OTHER RECENT BOOKS
THE MONTH'S REPRINTS WHEN Benjamin Jowett died in 1893, he bequeathed Balliol his writings, to be " republished from time to time." His monumental translation of Plato, first pub- lished in 1871, had already reached a third edition in his lifetime, and this has remained the basis of reprints in whole or part. The fourth edition of The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 4 vols. E6 6s. the set) has been in the care of Mr. D. J. Allan and Mr. H. E. Dale, editors appointed by the Copyright Trustees, and it varies in many points from the 1892 edition. The Epistles, the Epinonias, and two admittedly spurious, dialogues are omitted ; the editors have included and translated the Greater Hippias ; the se- quence has been rearranged, the marginal analyses left out, and the digressive parts of the introductions pruned. Jowett regarded his Plato (which he called " only a trans- lation ") more as a work of literary art than of classical scholarship, and the present editors have succeeded in making a closer reconciliation—one that would give the Master no cause for resentment—of his text to the Greek. In the dimensions of modern publishing, The Dialogues is a sizable achievement and an eminently worthwhile set.
Another reissued Victorian translation is Saint Augustine : Confessions (Dent, Every- man. 6s.), in Dr. Pusey's version that first appeared in 1838 and, being far from smooth reading, cries out for a modern revision. Penguin Classics, however, have two new translations to offer : David Magarshack 's of Dostoyevsky's The Devils, more familiar under the title The Possessed (5s.) and John Wood's of Moliere : Five Plays (2s. 6d.). They are all prose plays, and two of them, L'Amouti Medecin and Don Juan, are comparatively unknown to English
readers. The difficulties of translation have been admirably overcome.
It is heartening to see English Wits (Hutchinson, *10s. 6d.) again available. It dates from 1940, when Leonard Russell presented fourteen tributes to the lives and jests or such figures as Sydney Smith, Whistler, and Wilde, by genial modern authors. Physically, the book has a heavy photolithographic blur that is very little in sympathy with the diamond incisiveness of its spiritual content.
A children's book, and a very good one too, emerges from 1932; it is John Buchan's The Magic Walking-Stick (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 9s. 6d.), a fine adventure and fantasy with illustrations which the reader is left to guess are the author's.
Mrs. Joan Bennett's Four Metaphysical Poets (they are Donne, Herbert, Vaughan,
and Crashaw) is in a second and revised edition (Cambridge, 15s.). This is an excel- lent introduction to a school of poetry that is losing the lustre of fashion, but none of its true depth.
John Masefield's The Conway (Heine- mann, 25s.) is a revised edition of the story
of the famous line of training ships, now
vanished, for the last Conway was totally wrecked in the Menai Straits earlier in the year. The Poet Laureate himself served as a cadet on this frigate, and draws on his own memories, as, well as many Other accounts to enlarge his narrative.
In the twenty years since C. W. Scott- Giles's Civic Heraldry (Dent, 45s.) appeared,
some 240 local authorities have been granted armorial bearings ; indeed, by far the greater number in this comprehensive record denote a modern desire to have some symbolic token of authority. The many illustrations, apart from mediwval arms, Can be recommended as a warning to civic bodies that propose to go in for heraldry ; too many of them are unhappy compromises of old and new, or the kind of confused enigma where falcons and boars' heads jostle pick-axes and glass-blowers. Mr. Scott-Giles has done fine and devoted work in this book, and it is to be hoped that he will be rewarded by more nobly-designed arms for the next edition.
The residue of reprints includes an excel- lent thin-paper edition in the Oxford Standard Authors of Boswell's Life of Johnson (Oxford, 16s.) ; Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in the Everyman Library (Dent, 6s. each) ; Sir John Maud and S. E. Finer's Local Government in England and Wales, a revised second edition in the Home Univer- sity Library (Oxford, 6s.), and the fourth edition of Samuel Hays's An Outline of Statistics (Longmans, 10s. 6d.). Paper- backs include the intriguing Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr (Pan Books, 2s. 6d.), Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Dr. M. R. James's terrify- ing Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (Pan Books, each 2s.). Penguin Books reprint W. G. de Burgh's The Legacy of the Ancient World in two volumes (2s. 6d. each), a brilliant study of the intellectual contribu- tions of Israel, Greece and Rome to Western civilisation.
PAUL DINNAGE
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