faults, loves everything and everybody.
In return most people will be prepared to love him. And he deserves to
be loved for the sake of a book which has a happy beginning, a happy
middle and a happy end, together with lots of incidental laughter.

* * * * *

"There is a teacup storm in the Close, I hear. The Dean altered the time
of closing the Minster for summer cleaning or some such trifle, and did
not consult the Chapter, which had already made its holiday
arrangements." This sentence, chosen at random from _Quisquiliae_, the
diary of _Henry Savile_, will do well enough to support my contention
that _Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours_ (MURRAY) is going to be a great
boon to the cathedral cities of our Midland shires. Under the form of a
narrative of social life in Sunningwell, Dr. WARRE CORNISH has elected
to arrange his views on religion, art, literature, politics and the
questions of the day, sometimes putting them into the mouths of his
characters and sometimes into the note-book of the afore-mentioned
_Henry Savile_, a leisured cripple whose disquisitions on letters and on
people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and
much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow
periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. _Mr. Henry Savile_
quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely for the taste of a
decadent age, and his friends, _Dr. Ashford, Lady Grace_, the bishop's
wife, _Olive_, her niece, and _Philip Daly_, nephew of an archdeacon and
parliamentary candidate for Sunningwell, would be a little more amusing
if they were treated in a more Trollopian manner, and did not so
faithfully discuss the burning controversies of the time. But, after
all, the great excitement in _Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours_ (and I
really cannot advise any resident in--shall we say Mercia?--to be
without it) is the chance it affords for such questions as: Who is the
Dean? Does the author really mean Canon X? Are we living in Sunningwell,
or is it L----? Even I myself, in this metropolitan backwater, have made
one or two ingenious guesses, but wild taxicabs would not drag them from
me.

* * * * *

At this time of day to attempt criticism upon a new novel by MISS RHODA
BROUGHTON seems almost impertinent. The tens of thousands to whom she
has given such pleasure before now would probably be willing to read
anything that was