e Latin at War_ (CONSTABLE). You must not expect much of that inside
information which the author, as an American journalist, must have been
sorely tempted to produce. Indeed he has little to offer us that has not
been common property of the Correspondents for long enough, and several
of his descriptions (his picture of a glacier, for one), given with a
rather irritatingly childlike air of new discovery, cannot escape the
charge of commonplace. But his reflections, for once in a way the better
half of experience, more than make good this defect. His essay on Paris,
for instance--"the city of unshed tears"--is something more than
interesting, and his analysis of the cause of the successes of the
French army, in the face of initial defects of material, even better.
The author of _Westward Ho!_, considering the Spanish and English navies
of ELIZABETH'S time, found precisely the same contrasted elements of
autocracy and brotherliness producing just those results that we find
respectively in the German and French forces of to-day--on the one hand
a mechanical perfection of command, on the other an informed equality
which, somehow, does not make against efficiency whilst fostering
individuality. Mr. IRWIN hardly refers to our own Army; but one is
thankful to remember that discipline by consent, one of the virtues of
true democracy, is not the exclusive tradition of our French allies.

* * * * *

_A London Posy_ (MILLS AND BOON) is a story with at least an original
setting. So far as I know, Miss SOPHIE COLE is the first novelist to
group her characters about an actual London house preserved as a memorial
to former inhabitants. The house in question is that in Gough Square,
where Dr. JOHNSON lived, and two of the chief characters are _George
Constant_, the curator, and his sister, to whom the shrine is the most
precious object in life ("housemaid to a ghost," one of the other
personages rather prettily calls her). It therefore may well be that to
ardent devotees of the great lexicographer this story of what might have
happened in his house to-day will make a stronger appeal than was the
case with me, who (to speak frankly) found it a trifle dull. It might be
said, though perhaps unkindly, that Miss COLE looks at life through such
feminine eyes that all her characters, male and female, are types of
perfect womanhood. In _Denis Laurie_, the gentle essayist and recluse,
one might expect to find some