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Lately, Mr. E.F.  BENSON seems to have been devoting himself almost wholly to chronicling the short and simple annals of the middle-aged.  With one exception, all his recent protagonists have been, if not exactly in the sere and yellow, at least ripely mature.  So that such a title as that of his latest novel, An Autumn Solving (COLLINS), produced in me rather a feeling of familiar expectancy than of surprise.  Also when the wrapper artist clothes a volume with a picture of an elderly gentleman obviously giving up an attractive young woman of perhaps one-third his years it is idle to pretend that the contents retain all the thrill of the unforeseen.  Having said so much, I can let myself go in praise (as how often before) of those qualities of insight and gently sub-acid humour that make a BENSON novel an interlude of pure enjoyment to the “jaded reviewer.”  In case the indiscreet cover may happily have been removed before the volume reaches your hands, I do not propose to give away the plot in any detail.  The autumn sowing of course produces a crop not exactly of wild oats, but of romantic tares that springs in the hitherto barren heart of one Keeling, prosperous tradesman, husband, father, mayor, public benefactor and baronet, by reason of the too sympathetic damsel who types his letters and catalogues his library.  That library shows Mr. BENSON’S genius; without it I should hardly have been able to believe in the subsequent happenings, but, given this “secret garden,” all the tragedy is explained.  I have left myself no space in which to do justice to some admirable characterization. Keeling’s wife is worthy of a place in the author’s long gallery of woolly-witted matrons; while in Silverdale he has given a study of clerical futility and egotism almost savage in its detestability, a portrait at which one laughs and shudders together.  Of course the book will have, and deserve, a huge welcome.

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The union of scholarship and sympathy, enthusiasm and eloquence, is rare; yet these qualities are to be found in perfect harmony in the stately volume on the poets’ poet which has just been published under the style, on the cover, Life of John Keats, and on the title-page, John Keats, His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame (MACMILLAN)—­a volume upon which Sir SIDNEY COLVIN has been engaged ever since his retirement from the Print Room of the British Museum, and may be said to have been preparing to write all his days, ever since, as a boy, he first opened the “magic casement.”  A book representing so long and ardent a devotion, and written by one whose loyalties have always been so cordially sustained and acknowledged, could not but glow; and it is its warmth of feeling which, to my mind, peculiarly marks this very distinguished work.  It is more than a life; it is a “companion” to KEATS so complete and understanding that one can with confidence apply to it the abused word, “definitive.”  Critical essays on the poet no doubt will continue to appear, but this is the last biographical monument likely to be raised to him.