mention it.

* * * * *

Those--and I suspect they are many--whose first real enthusiasm for
ABRAHAM LINCOLN was kindled by Mr. JOHN DRINKWATER'S romantic morality
play can profitably take up Mr. IRVING BACHELLER'S _A Man for the
Ages_ (CONSTABLE) for an engaging account of the early days of the
great Democrat. They will forgive a certain flamboyance about the
author's preliminaries. Hero-worship, if the hero be worthy, is a very
pardonable weakness, and they should certainly admire the skill and
humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly,
the story of lanky ABE, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical
strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his
lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. A
romance of reasonable interest and plausibility is woven round young
Lincoln's story. Perhaps Mr. BACHELLER makes his hero speak a little
too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say
queer things, such as, "What so vile as a cheap aristocracy, growing
up in idleness, too noble to be restrained, with every brutal passion
broad-blown as flush as May?" What indeed! The picture of pioneering
America in the thirties is a fresh and interesting one.

* * * * *

To few of those who visit Switzerland, with its incomparable
mountains, can it have occurred that, once a man is kept there against
his will, it can be a prison as damnable as any other; possibly even
more damnable by reason of those same inevitable mountains. British
prisoners of war interned there knew that. Mr. R. O. PROWSE, in _A
Gift of the Dusk_ (COLLINS), speaks with subtle penetration for those
other prisoners, interned victims of the dreadful malady. Of necessity
he writes sadly; but yet he writes as a very genial philosopher,
permitting himself candidly "just that little cynicism which helps
to keep one tolerant." He is of the old and entertaining school of
sentimental travellers, but he is far from being old-fashioned. The
story running through his observations and modern instances is so
frail and delicate a thing that I hesitate to touch it and to risk
disturbing its bloom. All readers, save the very young and the very
old, will do well to travel with him, from Charing Cross ("I have a
childlike fondness for trains. I like to be in them, I like to see
them go by") to the peaceful, almost happy end, at the moun