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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned, Clerks.)

The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (MACMILLAN) is a book that may be regarded as filling, at least partially, what has long been an aching void in our biographical shelves.  I say partially, because the time has not perhaps fully come for an unreserved appreciation of a character whose handling must present exceptional difficulties.  One cannot but notice how many obstacles Mr. EDMUND GOSSE has had to overcome, or avoid, in the present volume.  The result inevitably is a certain sense of over-discretion that makes the whole study so detached as to be at times lacking in vitality.  Even, however, with these reservations the figure of the poet stands out, bewildering as it must have been in life, with its strange blend of frailty and genius.  Stories abound also (sometimes one suspects Mr. GOSSE of having fallen back upon anecdote with an air of relief); they range from the early days of brilliant “failures” at Eton and Balliol to those when in the watchful security of Putney the lamp was guarded by hands so zealous that its flame was ultimately extinguished.  Two of the tales remain pleasantly in my memory, one of them describing how young ALGERNON, lately sent down from Oxford and a pupil at the rectory of the future Bishop STUBBS, scared away his host’s rustic congregation by leaning upon the garden-gate one Sunday morning, looking, with his red-gold hair and scarlet dressing-gown, like some “flaming apparition.”  The other, less picturesque but more credible, has also a bishop in it, and concerns an untimely recitation of Les Noyades.  I will leave you to find this for yourself in a book that forms at least an interesting, if not altogether final, study of a fascinating subject.

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For an old hand BENJAMIN SWIFT shows a poor discretion in crowding too many characters into his pages to allow of anything like adequate characterisation, and indeed, in What Lies Beneath (CHAPMAN AND HALL), he is too much concerned with his main purpose of tract-making to be sufficiently interested in the subsidiary business of good story-telling.  A Mr. Ravendale, an unpleasant, hoary-bearded patriarch and opulent seller of Bibles, who has buried three wives and lives in a fat Bloomsbury house with the collected offspring of his three marriages, and one or two step-children thrown in, is haunted by a doubt as to whether the beautiful Ruby Delmore, daughter of the widow Delmore, his second wife, is also the daughter of the late Mr. Delmore or of himself, whose attitude towards Mrs. Delmore had not been as correct as that of a seller of Bibles is reasonably expected to be, especially by people like the author who don’t believe in Bibles.  At any rate Sebastian, son by the first marriage, is desperately in love with Ruby—­so,