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(Continued from page 532.) Mr. Augustine Birrell has celebrated his eightieth birthday by publishing a new volume of literary essays. In Et Cetera (Chatto and Windus, 7s. 6d.) he has collected sixteen papers originally written for periodicals or delivered as addresses. Beginning with " A Few Warning Words for Would-be Autobiographers," Mr. Birrell, explaining why he has never undertaken his own memoirs, reflects that, for the intelligent reader who can see between the lines, autobiographies reveal their authors too mercilessly. It is not what the autobio- grapher says, but his manner of saying it, that gives him away I The hatred of hypocrisy which this essay manifests runs throughout _the book. In " Boswell Disrobed," for instance, Mr. Birrell allows that Johnson's biographer was guilty of ahnost every vice and folly, but that he was " most emphatically not a Hypocrite, and may therefore take up his unrobed position in our Gallery of Notabilities without any feeling that he is intruding himself upon the company of his Betters." Other themes include " The Province of the Reviewer Defined," " Nathaniel Hawthorne," and " Thomas Love Peacock " ; and Mr. Birrell is particularly at ease in writing of Wyclif, Bunyan, Whitfield, and some lesser figures in Nonconformist history. His concluding essay, discussing the recent Prayer Book controversy, shows that age has not sapped his zeal for independence ; while his characteristic humour, with its gentle yet caustic irony, is still undiminished.
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