... Narcissus. By Viola Meynell. i Martin Seeker.) Reading Miss Meynell's story is like listening to a finely modulated voice telling so evenly and so clearly the heart of a matter. She has caught from her mother that exquisite something which has no need to ennoble the soul's encounters because it already sees them noble in essence. This tale of two brothers is abundant demonstration. Almost any ...

... Ten Degrees Backwards. By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. (Hodder and Stoughton.) There is a gulf of years fixed between seventeen and forty-two, but miracles do happen, and they happen in Mrs. Fowler's story. To begin with, when the cleverest specialist from town can do no more than leave an injured boy to pass as easily as possible, a tall man in a perfectly fitting frock-coat arrives to heal. ...

... THE** CRITIC ON THE** HEARTH5* i Km a r Bt A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK. THERE are literary valetudinarians who are as fastidious in their tastes as the common or garden invalid is in the matter of food. One sympathises with such delicate persons up to a point, but draws the line when they take an absurd pride in being so afflicted, as if their sickly limitations were to be pre ferred to the robuster ...

... The Kaleidoscope. By the Hon. Mrs. Dowdall. Duckworth Mrs. Dowdall's idea of a plumber's elopement with a well-to-do daughter of the middle-class house where he went to mend the taps, and his subsequent rise to an old Scotch baronetcy by several deaths, is good enough in itself for robust comedy, if not farce. Beyond that idea there is no con struction in The Kaleidoscope but Mrs. Dowdall's ...

... THEW: CRITIC ON 1THE HEARTH ror ...

... o THE CRITIC ON THE HEARTH^ c a/jy By A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK. OUR best novelists seem determined to be poets as well, and I doubt whether it can be done to any satisfactory extent. No author has yet achieved greatness in both arts, and the old proverb about the two stools is still true. Galsworthy, Phill- potts, Zangwill, Oxenham, and the rest may urge that Dickens, Thackeray, and Smollett used ...

... . By Fyodor Dostokvsky Heinemann If the three sisters who cook spells by the wayside for Macbeth and other fate-driven men received an urgent call elsewhere, and were thus obliged to leave their charmed pot to the care of a mere mortal, thev would naturally look for a man of imagination by choice a literary man, a poet, as likely to be most impressive if it came to an affair of incantation. ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. THE BESIEGED KNIGHT OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR: LIEGE UNDER FIRE* A Battle From Bed. Dr. Hamelius does not claim intimacy with the stricken field. If, he writes, the reader expects an account of battle and heroic deeds, he will be disappointed to learn that my only experience of actual fighting reached me in bed, and never extracted me from it. This is what an auricular ...

... Jenny Cartwright. By George Stephenson. (The Bodlty Head.) Jenny is a name with a comfortable domestic tone; but Jane, or especially Joan, puts a different aspect on it at once-- and Mr. Stephen son's heroine is nearer sister to the Maid than Jenny would imply. Her story takes long to tell, the construction of it lacks thought and unity, but the diver sions could hardly be spared, for they ...

... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. VERBOTEN LAND DOMESTICITY IN GERMANY* Flats Above all things, Germany is the verboten land. So many things are forbidden that nothing short of a calculating machine could keep count of them. Every Man His Own Lawyer would be the size of a brace of London Directories if it were published in the enemy's country. Landlord and Tenant, for example, would call for many ...

... Two Sinners. By Mrs. David E. Ritchie. (Smith, Elder.) As the title Two Sinners has something of the note of illicit romance in it, let it be said at once that, so far from being anything of the kind, it is a penetrative, poignant studv of three sisters' lives nice, well-bred young Englishwomen whose story is sure to be one of temperament rather than of passions. There is the eldest, a mother ...

... Hugh Gordon. BY KOSAMONO oOUTHEY. (Duckworth.) Hugh Gordon comes with the sound of guns, for it is really an episode of the Boer War. Love, intrigue, and battle are boon companions for a rousiner tale, and Miss Southey's story is a rousing tale not without tragic echoes of that far-away year when we read with anxious hearts such bulletins as Hard pressed from the defenders of Ladysmith. ...