the fight between man and
nature. It is told by Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH with considerable power and
a quickening touch of symbolism that lifts it into romance. The ambition
of _Reuben Backfield_ was to enlarge the Sussex farm that he had
inherited from his easy-going father till its bounds should include a
certain coveted moor. The book shows how his entire life was spent in
the achievement of this end; how for it he sacrificed his own ease, and
the happiness of his brother, his two wives and his many children, and
how finally he triumphed, and in his lonely old age, seeing the desired
acres all his own, was content. It is a grim book, with only now and
then a touch of suggested poetry to save it from being uniformly sordid
and depressing. As it is, the long unsparing struggle takes somehow the
dignity of an epic. Only one of _Reuben's_ many sons makes any success
out of life--_Richard_, who becomes a barrister, and treats his father
to occasional visits of curiosity and amused patronage. There is a
chapter of cynical humour in which the intolerant contemptuous old
rustic is confronted by the art-loving triflers who gather in his son's
drawing-room. Otherwise he is alone. "There's no one gone from here as
has ever come back!" But I was glad that Miss KAYE-SMITH had the courage
to play fair by her hero, and to give him at last his share of the hard
bargain. This is only one of many qualities that make _Sussex Gorse_ a
novel to be remembered.

* * * * *

I can't quite make out what made Mr. WILLIAM HEWLETT persist in
_Introducing William Allison_ (SECKER). Probably a nice general
conviction (rather infectious; I caught it) of his own cleverness. If
his work wants a good deal of pulling together separate bits of it are
confoundedly well done. The schoolboy conversations (_William_ is a
Winchester man, thrown into a lawyer's clerkship straight from the
sixth) and the picture of the superbly groomed associates of his
friend's brother, _Marmaduke Fenton_, are cases in point, though I don't
think Winchester would have been so absurdly abashed by the glories of
bachelordom in Half-Moon Street. So too is the lecture of _Parbury_, the
neo-decadent, on the cultivation of "that sacred and imperishable
flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if
it be only a belated cutting from _The Green Carnation_. _William's_
first boyish passion for a quite cold shop-minx, with its ago