taff of Learned, Clerks._)

_The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne_ (MACMILLAN) is a book that may be
regarded as filling, at least partially, what has long been an aching void
in our biographical shelves. I say partially, because the time has not
perhaps fully come for an unreserved appreciation of a character whose
handling must present exceptional difficulties. One cannot but notice how
many obstacles Mr. EDMUND GOSSE has had to overcome, or avoid, in the
present volume. The result inevitably is a certain sense of over-discretion
that makes the whole study so detached as to be at times lacking in
vitality. Even, however, with these reservations the figure of the poet
stands out, bewildering as it must have been in life, with its strange
blend of frailty and genius. Stories abound also (sometimes one suspects
Mr. GOSSE of having fallen back upon anecdote with an air of relief); they
range from the early days of brilliant "failures" at Eton and Balliol to
those when in the watchful security of Putney the lamp was guarded by hands
so zealous that its flame was ultimately extinguished. Two of the tales
remain pleasantly in my memory, one of them describing how young ALGERNON,
lately sent down from Oxford and a pupil at the rectory of the future
Bishop STUBBS, scared away his host's rustic congregation by leaning upon
the garden-gate one Sunday morning, looking, with his red-gold hair and
scarlet dressing-gown, like some "flaming apparition." The other, less
picturesque but more credible, has also a bishop in it, and concerns an
untimely recitation of _Les Noyades_. I will leave you to find this for
yourself in a book that forms at least an interesting, if not altogether
final, study of a fascinating subject.

* * * * *

For an old hand BENJAMIN SWIFT shows a poor discretion in crowding too many
characters into his pages to allow of anything like adequate
characterisation, and indeed, in _What Lies Beneath_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL), he
is too much concerned with his main purpose of tract-making to be
sufficiently interested in the subsidiary business of good story-telling. A
_Mr. Ravendale_, an unpleasant, hoary-bearded patriarch and opulent seller
of Bibles, who has buried three wives and lives in a fat Bloomsbury house
with the collected offspring of his three marriages, and one or two
step-children thrown in, is haunted by a doubt as to whether the beautiful
_Ruby Delmore_, daughter of the wi