A History of Eton College. By Lionel Cust. (Duckworth and
Co. 5s. net.) – Mr. Lionel Cast is to be congratulated on his History of Eton College. It was a difficult task to carry out. In the first place, Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte's comprehensive and interesting book on the same subject holds the field, and the temptation to use the volume as equerry for materials is one that itrwould seem hard to resist. Again, Mr. Wasey Sterry's readable volume, which has recently appeared, has cut away the ground from under the feet of the popular historian. But Mr. Cuet has taken a line of his own, and though he is of course bound to traverse the same regions, yet he has done so with considerable freshness and an adequate array of new material. An excellent feature of the book is the space devoted to celebrated Etonians, with the salient points of each career crisply touched in a sentence or two. The illustrations are interesting, but might be more clearly printed. We suppose that it is inevitable to devote a con- siderable space to athletics, but there is a certain grotesqueness in the arraying of the names of football players and sprinters as though they had conferred as much distinction on Eton as the Premiers and Divines of the earlier pages. But that is a small point, and possibly many readers of the book will be of opinion that if either class were to be omitted the merely historical per- sonages ought to be sacrificed.
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