FROM CORONET TO CROWN, or THE LIFE OF WILLIAM THE
CONQUEROR. By Sarah Henry Benton.
(Kegan Paul. 103. 6d.)—With every good wish to encourage
what might have been a praiseworthy effort, the duty that the reviewer owes to the public compels him to say that From
Coronet to Crown is in every sense of the word inferior work. Here is no new material, nor even old material set out in a new way ; the book purports to be based on early chronicles, extracts from which constantly appear, however, in modern French. Moreover " La Splendour de Dieu " was not William's favourite oath. The English of the book is sloppy to a degree— seldom is it possible to light on a worse bit of writing than the sentence (120 words long) on p. xix. ; split infinitives and faulty phraseology run riot through the book, and misprints and misspellings enter into gleeful competition with them. The justification advanced for the production of the work is that in the summer of 1927 will be celebrated the 000th anniversary of William's birth. Were this kind of excuse a valid one, there would be no end to book compiling, and in 1925 we might, on this principle, have had a new work cele- brating the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Jonathan Wild, or be looking forward in 1970 to a memoir which should reilluminc the immortal memory of Daniel Lambert.
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