f Ages Calls for Peace", a poem
by Mrs. Frona Scott, has fairly regular metre, though its sentiment is
one of conventional and purely emotional pacifism. "A Gentle Satire on
Friendship", by Freda de Larot, is a very clever piece of light prose;
which could, however, be improved by the deletion of much slang, and the
rectification of many loose constructions. "A Wonderful Play" is Mrs.
Eloise R. Griffith's well worded review of Jerome K. Jerome's "The
Passing of the Third Floor Back", as enacted by Forbes-Robertson. Mrs.
Griffith has here, as in all her essays, achieved a quietly pleasing
effect, and pointed a just moral. "Fire Dreams" is a graphic and
commendably regular poem by Mrs. Renshaw. "The Beach", a poem by O. M.
Blood, requires grammatical emendation. "How better could the hours been
spent" and "When life and love true pleasure brings" cannot be excused
even by the exigencies of rhyme and metre. After the second stanza, the
couplet form shifts in an unwarranted manner to the quatrain
arrangement. The phraseology of the entire piece displays poetical
tendencies yet reveals a need for their assiduous cultivation through
reading and further practice. "My Shrine", by James Laurence Crowley,
exhibits real merit both in wording and metre, yet has a rather weak
third stanza. The lines:

"One day I crossed the desert sands;
One day I ride my train;"

are obviously anticlimactic. To say that the subject is trite would be a
little unjust to Mr. Crowley's Muse, for all amatory themes, having been
worked over since the very dawn of poesy, are necessarily barren of
possibilities save to the extremely skilled metrist. Contemporary
love-lyrics can scarcely hope to shine except through brilliant and
unexpected turns of wit, or extraordinarily tuneful numbers. The
following lines by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, who died in 1673,
well express the situation despite their crudeness:

"O Love, how thou art tired out with rhyme!
Thou art a tree whereon all poets climb;
And from thy branches every one takes some
Of the sweet fruit, which Fancy feeds upon.
But now thy tree is left so bare and poor,
That they can hardly gather one plum more!"

"Indicatory", a brilliant short sketch by Ethel Halsey, well illustrates
the vanity of the fair, and completes in pleasing fashion a very
creditable number of our official magazine.

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THE UNITED AMATEUR for May f