Some Books of the Week Tim Poet Laureate recently contributed
to this journal a poem on Adam and Eve, as Chaucer might have told their story. The poem was obviously a jets ftesprit, but it showed -how closely Mr. John Masefield has studied the master whose influence upon his own work—particularly in Reynard the Fox—is clearly apparent. It was fitting that Mr. Masefield should have chosen Chaucer as the subject for his Leslie Stephen Lecture recently delivered at Cambridge. The lecture is now printed by the Cambridge University Press (2s.). As in his study of Shakespeare in the Home University Library, Mr. Masefield displays in this brochure his gift for compressing a vast amount of information and of shrewd, independent criticism into a little space. Within thirty-six pages he gives us a picture of Chaucer's - England, a portrait ( warts and all ") of Chaucer the man, and much penetrating comment on his poetry. There is; too, a good deal of reflection upon wider issues, revealing again the Poet Laureate's pre- occupation with literature as a vital force, bursting the banks within which mere aestheticism would confine it. There is an underlying challenge to the spirit of our own age in his gay satire on the " pilgrimage to Saint Ski in winter, or the blissful Lido in the summer," which Chaucer might have taken for his theme if he were living to-day,
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