Poems of Passion and Pleasure. By Ella Wheeler Wilcox. (Gay
and Hancock. 15s. net.)—Mrs. Wilcox has, we believe, a great vogue among feminine readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and there will be many purchasers to welcome this sumptuous edition of some of her prolific work. It would be useless and unduly harsh to address to her one of her own lines, "No one will grieve because your lips are dumb," but it does strike an unromantic male critic that her success is simply a result of taking obvious and often quite wholesome moralisations and overlaying them with a verbose sentimentality which is sometimes thin and sometimes (what is worse) luscious. Mr. Dudley Tennant has caught the spirit in his illustrations. The frontispiece recalls Mr. Goetze's worst "shockers" : the other pictures have some fine lines and bold splashes of colour, as in his blazing flames of passion, but they give the general impression of playing down to a sickly taste rather than being expressions of any sound force or art.
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