BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
THERE are not very many books this week and no novels of interest. The publishers have sent me a book which has already made a reputation for itself in France—M. Andi Maurois's Ariel (Librairie Grasset). It is a life of Shelley. At first glance it seems an attractive book and extremely well written. There is always something amusing to English readers in translations into another language. Here is Dr. Keate's, the formidable Head of Eton's, direction to his charges : " Soyez charitables, boys, ou je vows battrai jusqu' rk ce que vows le deveniez."
What seems a very attractive book is one by Miss D. H. Moutray Read, author of Highways and Byways in Hampshire. It is an account of One Garden (Williams and Norgate), made round a charming half-timbered, straggling old cottage. We are given the whole process of garden-making, which is described with immense zest, from laying out and digging to all kinds of ultimate glories of hedge and rose gardens and rockery. There are admirable appendices which will make the book not only pleasant to read but likely to be of real help to inexperienced gardeners.
An enormous book of origins comes from Messrs. Allen and Unwin. It is called Entente Diplomacy and the World : Matrix of the History of Europe, 1909-14. It is by M. B. de Siebert, late Secretary of the Imperial Russian Embassy at London, and is edited by George Abel Schreiner. There is, or purports to be, a good deal of new matter in this large volume, which is certainly not written from the official Entente standpoint.
It is interesting to see a book by Mr. Humbert Wolfe on Labour Supply and Regulation appearing in the series issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Humphrey Milford). Mr. Wolfe, our readers may remember, has just published an amusing little book of satires called Circular Saws, and writes extremely modem poems. Dare
one hope for a book on such a subject which is attractively as well as instructively written ?
Messrs. Selwyn and Blount publish A Study of the Origins of Dryden's Heroic Plays, by Mr. J. B. Pendlebury, which might well be interesting. I hope that he has not devoted himself too entirely to literary, to the neglect of psychological,
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