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d nervy a person to fit my ideal of a paternal landlord, and what is, after all, more important, I feel convinced that his tenants and stable-lads would have thought the same. Secondly, I refuse to believe that a spinster, however soured, however much devoted to the cause of Labour and misguided crusades for social purity, would have behaved as _Miss Baker_ does in this book; and deliberately attempted to father a false scandal on _Sir Robert_ merely because she hated his type. And if the author replies that he knows of such an instance I maintain that it was just one of those things which the art of selection should have prompted him to leave out. I have, of course, no fault to find with Mr. DICKINSON'S style, which as usual is curiously simple yet at the same time attractive, nor with his powers of character-sketching. His schoolboy of seventeen, _Eddie Durwold_, is in this book particularly good. It is the things that these people do that bothers me. And if I might venture to rename _The Business of a Gentleman_ the title I should choose is "The Escapade of an Egoist." * * * * * Mr. SIDNEY LOW has paid some visits to Egypt and the Sudan, has kept his eyes very wide open and has written _Egypt in Transition_ (SMITH, ELDER) in consequence. The Earl of CROMER, who has also been there or thereabouts, introduces the book to the notice of the public with an appreciative preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the clearest possible picture of the country--a stretch of sand, some pyramids in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling enigmatically--not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his illustrations reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining five for the vastly interesting facts, political, international, social and racial, with which he entertained me. It requires no small skill in a dispenser of such facts to make them entertaining. Twice only was I minded to quarrel with him; once when he expressed a general contempt, based upon one egregious example, for the foreign exports of Oxford and Cambridge, and again when he got on to the subject of touri
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