ut the things which
matter.

* * * * *

As a demonstration of the irony of history, I can hardly imagine a
better subject for romance at the present moment than the fortunes of
WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S _Prince and Heretic_
(METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it
is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer
and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story
foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of
Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by ALVA,
Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House of Hapsburg;
but he cannot conjure up out of his crystal the sight of a Catholic
Belgium suffering these things, three hundred and fifty years later,
at the hands of a Lutheran King allied with a Hapsburg and fighting
for the sake of no cause but his own vanity. Most of the action takes
place in Brussels--a Brussels placarded with squibs against CARDINAL
GRANVILLE; and the final retreat of WILLIAM, ruined in everything
except his spirit, to join the army of the PRINCE DE CONDE, has a
pathetic significance to-day that not many historical romances can
claim. Miss MARJORIE BOWEN has a remarkable gift for the presentation
of a number of lifelike portraits against a vivid and gorgeous
background, and the successive pictures of the Dutch and Flemish
Schools which she creates in _Prince and Heretic_, make it, if not
quite so successful as _I Will Maintain_, at least a book which no
lover of the Lowlands can afford to miss.

* * * * *

_Our Sentimental Garden_ (HEINEMANN) is one of the very pleasantest
garden-books I have encountered. One reason for this is that it is
about such a lot of other things besides gardens. Volumes that are
exclusively devoted to what I might call horticultural hortation are
apt to become oppressive. But AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE are persons far
too sympathetic not to avoid this danger. Instead of lecturing, they
talk with an engaging discursiveness that lures you from page to page,
as it might from bed to border, were you an actual visitor in the
exquisite Surrey garden that is their ostensible subject. One thing
with them leads to another. "Lilacs," they say. "Ah, lilacs--" and
immediately one of them is started upon a whole series of rambling, DU
MAURIERISH recollections of school-days in Second Empire Pa