A Virtuous Widow and Others. Edited with an introduction Donald
Carswell. (Hodge 6s.)
THE jacket of this volume is a clout to be cast at first sight. That done, the book announces itself as " A Gallery of Types." Actually it is a collection of excerpts from familiar seventeenth- century writers of Characters—Overbury, Earle, Fuller, Butler, Hall, Flecknoe—in a modernised text with glossarial footnote,. (Three times we must be told that " censure " means " criticise.") The thing at the end called " Index " is a list of the titles given to the jumbled extracts, serving no purpose. An index of authors is not provided, though some account of them is given in the Introduction by the late Donald Carswell, which, if seldom on the mark, is, like all he wrote, graceful and allusive, and will give the book a value for those unable without reservations to support the publishers' claim that it is " a delightful book for any who are interested in people as such." Not that it is a bore to meet again Earle's Child, Overbury's Milkmaid, or Fuller's Good Wife. The few strangers to be encountered in these pages are not nearly people as such.
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