Mrs. SKRINE has collected some charming fragrant papers from various distinguished sources concerning the ever-recurring phenomenon of The Devout Lady (CONSTABLE), in order to inspire one JOAN, a V.A.D. heroine of the new order.  I guess JOAN, of whom only a faint glimpse is vouchsafed, must be a nice person—­the author’s affectionate interest in her is sufficient proof of that.  I suppose we all know our Little Gidding out of SHORTHOUSE’S John Inglesant.  Mrs. SKRINE deprecates the Inglesantian view and offers us a stricter portrait of MARY COLLET.  “Madam” THORNTON, Yorkshire Royalist dame in the stormy days of the Irish Rebellion and the Second JAMES’S flight to St. Germain, is another portrait in the gallery; then there’s PATTY MORE, HANNAH’S less famous practical sister, of Barleywood and the Cheddar Cliff collieries; and a modern great lady of a lowly cottage, in receipt of an old-age pension and still alive in some dear corner of England—­the best sketch of the series, because drawn from life and not from documents.  If the author has a fault it is her detached allusiveness, her flattering but mystifying assumption that one can follow all her references, and her rather mannered idiom:  “He proved a kind husband, but sadly a tiresome.”  These, however, be trifles.  Read this pleasant book, I beg you, and send it on to your own Joan.

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I have read with deep interest and appreciation and with a mournful pleasure the Letters of Arthur George Heath (BLACKWELL, Oxford).  It is the record, in a series of letters mostly written to his parents, of the short fighting life of a singularly brave and devoted man.  There is in addition a beautiful memoir by Professor GILBERT MURRAY, whose privilege it was to be ARTHUR HEATH’S friend.  HEATH was not vowed to fighting from his boyhood onward.  He was a brilliant scholar and afterwards a fellow of New College, Oxford.  The photograph of him shows a very delicate and refined face, and his letters bear out the warrant of his face and prove that it was a true index to his character.  Until the great summons came one might have set him down as destined to lead a quiet life amid the congenial surroundings of Oxford, but we know now that the real stuff of him was strong and stern.  He joined the army a day or two after the outbreak of war, being assured that our cause was just and one that deserved to be fought for.  He had no illusions as to the risk he ran, but that didn’t weigh with him for a moment.  On July 11th, 1915, he writes to his mother from the Western Front:  “Will you at least try, if I am killed, not to let the things I have loved cause you pain, but rather to get increased enjoyment from the Sussex Downs or from Janie (his youngest sister) singing Folk Songs, because I have found such joy in them, and in that way the joy I have found can continue to live?” Beautiful words these, and typical of the man who gave utterance