Scotch method, was that Esme had applied mustard-plasters to a Cabinet Minister’s person by affixing them to his dress-suit, and Tourntourq, the Chieftain, had nobly attempted to bear the blame.  Though married in haste they did not wait for leisure before they repented, but commenced quarrelling at once, until Esme, in order to test his love and that of an admirer who was helping to complicate matters, “bobbed” her hair and threw the severed tresses at her husband.  After this they separated.  Presently the War came, and the admirer, who was really quite a nice person, was killed, and Tourntourq, who was apparently a lunatic, though that is not stated in so many words, was blinded.  It seems quite superfluous to add that Tourntourq wins the V.C. and recovers both sight and wife in the last chapter; but there are such good patches in the book that I cannot help hoping that some day WILSON MACNAIR will try her hand (I feel it is her hand) at another, which I shall really believe in all through.

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Of late our costume-romancers have become strangely unprolific.  So I was the more pleased to find Mrs. ALICE WILSON FOX bravely keeping the old flag flying with a story bearing the gallant title, Too Near the Throne (S.P.C.K.).  I daresay its name may enable you to give a fairly shrewd guess at its plot.  This is an agreeable affair of a maid, reputed Catholic heir to the English Crown, and used as pretext for an abortive rising against KING JAMES I. You can see that in practised hands (as here) and decorated with a pretty trimming of sentiment, abductions, witch-finding and other appropriate accessories, this furnishes a theme rich in romance.  Perhaps I was a thought disappointed that more was not made of the actual conspiracy, and that, having started “too near the throne,” the tale subsequently gave it so wide a berth.  But this is no great fault.  I can witness that Mrs. WILSON FOX has at least one essential quality of the historical novelist in her appreciation of picturesque raiment.  Almost indeed she emulates those jewelled paragraphs in which the creator of Windsor Castle would fill half a chapter with a riot of sartorial coruscations.  As a birthday present, say for an appreciative niece, I can think of few volumes whose welcome would be better assured.

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Mr. JOHN MASEFIELD has brought together in St. George and the Dragon (HEINEMANN) a speech “given” by him in New York on last St. George’s Day, and a lecture on The War and the Future which he delivered up and down America from January to August of last year.  Since then many things have happened.  But nothing has happened that can make Mr. MASEFIELD other than proud of the part he has played in explaining and glorifying his country’s cause and commending it to the hearts and minds of all good Americans.  I confess that when I took up the book and read the