DING DONG BELL.

Ding Dong Bell. By Walter de in Mare. (Selwyn and Blount. 58. net.) Ir one looks at the skin of one's hand through a powerful glass, one is astonished and half disgusted at its coarseness, at the dirt, the stubby hairs, the rough, scaly texture. The noisy reader, interposing the lucid and refractive prose of Mr. de la Mare between himself and his thought, will be shocked in the same way at the din of his own mind. Mr. de in Mare's is not only finer ; it is so many times, so micro- scopically finer than the ordinary human organ as to seem of altogether a different kind What is there left for the reviewer to say about it nowadays ? One has as little hope of dissecting it with the ordinary critical tools of logic and emotion as of plunking out the veins of a primrose with poker and tongs.

The uneasy subject of Mortality draws, sooner or later, the articulate thought of every writer ; as it draws, sooner or later, the thoughts of every common man or woman. But it is in itself somehow so difficult of articulation that the writer—unwilling, like the rest of the world, to preserve his thought dumb—is yet compelled, if he is to get anything on to paper at all, to substitute for it one of two kinds of rhetoric : the rhetoric of belief, or of logic. In this short book, of three stories compounded largely of epitaphs, one feels the mind of Mr. de la Mare at its finest, and the subject of mortality approached without rhetoric—not of belief, nor of logic : not directly articulate, in fact, nor even allus- ively ; but instead, in a sense peculiarly Mr. de la Mare's, the fine texture revealed of the thing, usually jagged with melodramatics.

What, then, shall one do ? Quote? But the effect does not lie, as with rhetoric, in single sentences, turns of speech. Then quote some of the epitaphs ? They alone are detach- able, but they are in a sense not so good as the prose—are part of the prose, really, and only superficially detachable. Some, however, are witty :—

" This quiet mound beneath Lies Corporal Pyres.

He had no fear of death ; Nor Death of him "

P4 Stranger, a light I pray ! Not that I pine for day : Only one beam of light— To show me Night ! "

or the one ending :-

" And now we woepe no more than we forget."

All have a simplicity of sentiment suited to the =any* mows art

" My mother bore me : My father rejoiced in me :

The good priest blessed me 3

All people loved me ; But Death coveted me, And freed this body Of its youthful soul";

or this, on a Midget :-

"Just a span and half a span,

From head to heel was this little man. Scarce a capful of small bones Raised up erect this Midget once. Yet not a knuckle was askew ; Inches for feet God made him true ; And something handsome put between His coal-black hair and beardless chin. But now, forsooth, with mole and mouse, He keeps his own small darkened house."

But quotation is a disservice where the magic (one must sometimes use that poor pony, now so whipt, so flogged, so driven through the mire), where the magic lies rather in the gossamer web than in any single dewdrop on it—a magic that makes the reader doubt, almost, if either reason or belief can approach so dose to Mortality as this quiet, simple,