the book as a restful change from that class of literature.

* * * * *

Mr. H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON has invented a gentleman of the road, _Dick
Ryder_, of whom his publishers, METHUEN, confess themselves very proud
in that nice way they have. Armed with a bodkin and a barker he rushes
and tushes his way through life, slitting weasands and dubbing every
cully he meets a muckworm in the pleasant idiom current (so I take it on
faith) in the time of our second JAMES. I should have been more
impressed with this hero's feats in the first few tales of _As it
Chanced_ if they had been in the very faintest degree plausible. Never
surely were such preposterous fights, in which the whole action of a
score of desperate opponents is completely suspended while the
redoubtable one brings off his splendid stunts. I gratefully remember
once having been helped through a dull day by _The House on the Downs_.
Unless memory gilds my judgment the author put some reasonable amount of
invention into that. But these collected tales are rather indifferent
pot-boiling if you are to take any other standard but that of the
gallery's formula for yarns of adventure. Perhaps, "as it chanced," my
war lunch did not agree with me. But anyway I really cannot quite
honestly commend this volume to any but the most stalwart of Mr.
MARRIOTT WATSON'S many loyal friends.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI, VOL.
150, MARCH 22, 1916***

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