able one of casting
pleasant balance sheets. Then the mood passes, and he is driven back to
Flaubert's view that it is a dog's life, but the only one. He decides to
live down the extraordinary trash that novelists produce. Incredible as
truth may be, fiction is stranger still, and there is no limit to the
intoxications of the popular novelist. Consider, indeed, the following
account of six novels, taken from the reviews in the literary supplement
of the _Times_, of 27th July, 1916. In the first, _Seventeen_, Mr Booth
Tarkington depicts characters of an age indicated by the title,
apparently concerned with life as understood at seventeen, who conduct
baby talk with dogs. In the second, _Blow the Man Down_, by Mr Holman
Day, an American financier causes his ship to run ashore, while the
captain is amorously pursued by the daughter of the villainous
financier, and cuts his way out through the bottom of a schooner. _The
Plunderers_, by Mr Edwin Lefevre, is concerned with robbers in New York,
whose intentions are philanthropic; we observe also _Wingate's Wife_, by
Miss Violet Tweedale, where the heroine suffers 'an agony of
apprehension,' and sees a man murdered; but all is well, as the victim
happens to be the husband whom she had deserted twenty years before.
There is also _The Woman Who Lived Again_, by Mr Lindsey Russell, where
a cabinet, in office when the war breaks out, concerns itself with
German spies and an ancient Eurasian, who with Eastern secrets revives a
dead girl and sends her back to England to confound the spies. There is
also _Because It Was Written_, by Princess Radziwill, where Russian and
Belgian horrors are framed in between a prologue and epilogue entirely
devoted to archangels. There is nothing extraordinary in these novels;
they merely happen to be reviewed on the same day. The collection
compares perfectly with another, in the _Daily News_ of the 19th
September, 1916, where are reviewed a novel by Miss C. M. Matheson, one
by Mr Ranger Gull, and one by 'Richard Dehan.' They are the usual sort
of thing. The first is characterised by Mr Garnett as 'a hash of trite
images and sentimental meanderings.' Miss Matheson goes so far as to
introduce a shadowy, gleaming figure, which, with hand high upraised
over the characters' heads, describes the Sign of the Cross. Mr Ranger
Gull introduces as a manservant one of the most celebrated burglars of
the day, a peer poisoned with carbon disulphide, wireless apparat