SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Notice in this column does not necessarily proclude milmcguont norm) A rousing note is struck in These Glorious Times (Longmans and Co., 2d. net), in which Mica L. H. M. Soulsby sends the usual Christmas greeting to her Brondesbury girls. Without pretending to ignore the horrors of war, she reminds her young friends of its nobility when it is waged in a righteous cause, and shows that the present war is " every bit as much in tune with Christmas as the Crusades would have been." Miss fioulsby finds it possible to hope " that through the war false standards, unrealities, conventionalities are dying out that petty jealousies, old feuds, and jarring feelings, both in Society and in families, are being swept away in the flood tide Of a longing to help our fighters : that the bonds of marriage are being drawn tighter than before: that we have good hope efa wiser,nimpler, poorer and purer England." Among the numerous anthologies which the war has pro- duced, we may commend Poems of War and Battle, selected by V. H. Collins (Clarendon Press, 2a).—Tiruely, too, is the reissue of Mr. Newbolt'e stirring war-songs in The Island Race (Elkin Mathews, 2s. 6d. net). We do not envy the man who can read unmoved the beautiful lines on Clifton Chapel, which apply to-day to so many a hopeful young life-
" Qui ante diem pesiit- Bed miles, end pro patria."
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