comprehensible
twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, leading the life of the
typical English bachelor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit,
evening clothes and tweeds; passing from country house to London club,
from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the
cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic
aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned,
ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with
irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage.

Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he
succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the
spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of
the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie
open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he
were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set
them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched
by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which
presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical,
whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a
middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a
decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately
intellectual brainslide of our generation.

This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith
is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life,
tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness
which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds
of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our
home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a
flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as
disturbing as devilled crabs.

Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from
mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I
know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty
little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful
inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit.
A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so
far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare
not laugh for fear