4 MARCH 1922, Page 24

John Allen and His Friends. By Anna Otter Allen. (Hodder

and Stoughton. 12s. 6d. net.)—Miss Allen's pleasant and

• discursive book is concerned less with her father, the late Arch- deacon Allen, who died in 1886 at the age of seventy-six, than with his many eminent friends, including Tennyson, Thackeray and Edward Fitzgerald whom he knew at Cambridge, as well as Keble, Newman, John Stirling, James Spedding, Carlyle and the present Bishop of London. Miss Allen reprints many letters that have appeared elsewhere and adds some reminiscences of her own. In a letter of 1865 Allen repeated a, remark by Palmer- ston that Lord Cre.nbome, the future Lord Salisbury, " was the only man in his party who could think on his legs."