reat richness, gold and frankincense and myrrh.

"'But this,' he said, 'is for the child in Bethlehem!'"

=v=

Editor of the London Mercury, J. C. Squire has the light touch of the
columnist but limits himself somewhat more closely to books and the
subjects suggested by them. Very few men living can write about books with
more actual and less apparent erudition than Mr. Squire. Born in 1884,
educated at Cambridge, an editor of the New Statesman, a poet unsurpassed
in the field of parody but a poet who sets more store by his serious
verse, Mr. Squire can best be appreciated by those who have just that
desultory interest in literature which he himself possesses. I have been
looking through his _Books in General_, _Third Series_, for something
quotable, and I declare I cannot lift anything from its setting. It is all
of a piece, from the essay on "If One Were Descended from Shakespeare" to
the remarks about Ben Jonson, Maeterlinck, Ruskin, Cecil Chesterton and
Mr. Kipling's later verse (which I have nowhere seen more sensibly
discussed).

Well, perhaps these observations from the chapter "A Terrifying
Collection" will give the taste! It appears that an anonymous donor had
offered money to the Birmingham Reference Library to pay for the gathering
of a complete collection of the war poetry issued in the British Empire.
After some preliminary comment, Mr. Squire concludes:

"If that donor really means business I shall be prepared to supply him
with one or two rare and special examples myself. I possess tributes to
the English effort written by Portuguese, Japanese and Belgians; and paeans
by Englishmen which excel, as regards both simplicity of sentiment and
illiteracy of construction, any foreign composition. Birmingham is not
noted for very many things. It is, we know, the only large city in the
country which remains solidly Tory in election after election. It
produced, we know, Mr. Joseph and Mr. Austen Chamberlain. It has, we know,
something like a monopoly in the manufacture of the gods in wood and brass
to which (in his blindness) the heathen bows down; and there are all sorts
of cheap lines in which it can give the whole world points and a beating.
But it has not yet got the conspicuous position of Manchester or
Liverpool; and one feels that the enterprise of this anonymous donor may
help to put it on a level with those towns. For, granted that its
librarians take their commission seriously, and its friends give th