THIS WEEK'S BOOKS
M. KAREL CAPEK visited us with a kindly heart and a most bewildered head, and his Letters front England (Geoffrey Bles) make excellent reading. He finds little fault with us : his eyes are wide open in astonishment, but his judgment is
lenient. It is only the English Sunday, English cooking, London traffic blocks and Glasgow that he thinks execrable. Other criticisms are casual and mtid ; he tells us, for example, that at Wembley " I even had the luck to behold a statue of the Prince of Wales, made of Canadian butter, and it filled me with regret that the majority of London monuments are not also made of butter." His tour was religiously planned : England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland—he saw them all, and he writes amusing characterizations of their inhabitants. The drawings with which he illustrates his narrative are full of life. Mr. Paul Selver has translated the book into a grace. ful, naive English, most appropriate to M. apek's matter.
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