nd of plainness which in dealing with
enterprises of great pith and moment has a peculiar brilliancy of its
own. The account, for instance, of the Cambrai--Le Cateau battle, with
all its vicissitudes, is extraordinarily graphic and interesting, and
the story of the charge of some fifty men of the 9th Lancers against
more than twice their number of German Dragoons of the Guard stirs the
blood as with the sound of a trumpet. Delightful too is the narrative of
how Major BRIDGES found two hundred completely exhausted stragglers
seated despairingly upon the pavement of the square at St. Quentin, and
how by means of a penny whistle and a toy drum he got them to move and
brought them eventually to Roye and safety. Altogether a capital book.

* * * * *

_A Great Success_ (SMITH, ELDER) is about a new-risen literary star,
_Arthur Meadows_, his loving, unbrilliant wife, and a coruscating
society lion-huntress, _Lady Dunstable_. Having heard this much, you
will hardly need to be told that _Lady D._ takes up the author
violently, that he is dazzled by the glitter of her conversational
snares, and that the story resolves itself into a duel between her
ladyship and (I quote the publishers) "the wife whom she despises and
tries to set down." Nor are you likely to be in any uncertainty about
the final victory. This is brought about, with the assistance of the
long arm of coincidence, by _Doris_, the neglected wife, finding herself
in a position to prevent her rival's unsatisfactory son from contracting
matrimony with a very undesirable alien. _Doris_ indeed, and another
female victim of _Lady Dunstable_ (also deposited on the scene by the
same obliging arm), get busy unearthing so various a past for the
undesirable one that she retires baffled, epigrammatic brilliance bites
the dust, and domesticity is left triumphant. It is a jolly little
story, very short, refreshingly simple, and constructed throughout on
the most approved library lines. If the writer's name were not Mrs.
HUMPHRY WARD, I should say that she ought to be encouraged to persevere,
and even recommended to try her hand next time at something a little
more substantial.

* * * * *

Let me recommend Mr. ROTHAY REYNOLDS' _My Slav Friends_ (MILLS AND BOON)
as a corrective to Mr. STEPHEN GRAHAM's _Holy Russia_, which I
prescribed some while ago with faint reservations. Both writers set out
to interpret our myster