THE END OF A CHAPTER.
The End of a Chapter. By Shane Leslie. (Constable and Co. Ss. net).— This witty and indiscreet little book is the work of a very young man who, when invalided in hospital, began " to record notes and souvenirs of the times and institutions under which I had lived, realizing that I had witnessed the suicide of the civilization called Christian and the travail of a new era." Mr. Leslie has all the dogmatism and prejudice of youth, and his diatribes against our society, our Church, and our institutions in general before the war will annoy those who take them too seriously. But he writes attractively on Eton and Cambridge, on his recollections of his uncle Lord Randolph Churchill and of Mr. Winston Churchill, on his old Irish grandfather who was the Iron Duke's cousin and who had seen Talleyrand and talked with Walter Scott, and on Irish countryfolk and their remoteness from our ways of thought and life. He was at King's—not ten years ago—and draws a kindly and humorous sketch of Walter Headlam, the brilliant Aesehylean who would " instruct select groups of explorers in his own rooms " amid a chaos of books and papers. He has no new story of "0. B.," but he recalls Rupert Brooke, who was at King's with him, as a " semblance of a Greek god in a football shirt," and as " a youthful Gabriel" when he played the messenger in tho Eumenides. "The trouble in Ireland," says Mr. Leslie, " is that people are afraid of meeting for fear of becoming friends." The epigram has a good deal of truth in it.
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