Mr. A. St. John Adcock's Songs of The War (R.
Brimley Johnson, is. net) forms an excellent pendant to his volume of short stories, " In the Wake of the War," recently reviewed in these columns. Mr. Adcock's standpoint is that of the sober Imperialist, equally removed from the blatancy of the music-hall and the Little Englander's readiness to think the worst of his countrymen. He satirises with equal zest the man in the suburbs, too absorbed in his hobby to trouble about the war, the armchair strategist, the fraudulent contractor, and the Jingo bards who "tickle the brute" in us. Occasionally, as readers of the Spectator may remember, he employs the dialect of Hosea Biglow, but more often uses the unvarnished slang of the "man in the street." To represent Mr. Kruger as speaking the broken English of the German-American is, we think, a solecism. But the booklet is inspired from end to end by an honest patriotism expressed in vigorous and pointed verse.
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