I Mirror of Shalott. By Robert Hugh Benson. (Sir Isaac
'Pitman and Sons. 60)—This is a collection of stories of the kind conventionally known as supernatural told at a symposium of ,Chorahotee of the Roman Church ofter dinner in "the presbytery attached to the Canadian Church of S. Filippo in Rome." Father Benson himself appears as Mr. Benson, and claims to be merely the teller of the stories at second hand. The stories would have been 'my much more interesting if Father Benson had put one word of tierions preface saying whether the tales were merely inventions of his own, or whether any of them, and if so which, purported to be true. Mr. Bosanquet's tale would gain especially from the reader being possessed of this information. It is not unlike two stories reported in the Journal of the Psychical Society, and if duly authenticated would possess considerable interest. Mr. Bosauquet's account of his own sensations in his supposed death bears some resemblance to that strange feeling described as " imiemenf" or "vastness." The sensation which he describes as that of becoming "merely a speck in a circumference" reminds us of the accounts which have been given—for example, by Berlioz—of what Wordsworth calls
Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things. Fallings from us, saadshings."
But if the story is merely an ingenious invention of Father Benson's, the interest of it is proportionately diminished. It is a curious fact that in the great majority of these stories the main. festation is by spiritual evil, not by spiritual good, and it may seem perhaps surprising that, nominally told by men of high spiritual attainment, they should contain no news of the higher develop- ments of the spiritual world, but that one story after another should be concerned with the forges of eviL There are three stories of apparitions of the kind which look like the indentation of events on the material elements of the world, mid these are rather commonplace. The other stories, if they are held to be believed by their narrators, are of terrifying interest, and no more awful representation of the personality of evil has ever been given than in the tales told by the Reverend Father Rector andthe Reverend Father Girdlestone. Father Benson's language comes as near as language can to making his readers realise by analogy spiritual experiences which are incapable of being translated into the words and phrases of a material world.
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