IF the mental attitude of any critic has ever, in his approach to a first book of verse, been conciliated by an appreciative notice from some older pen, I should say (speaking out of no little experience) that either the author was dead and the fact advertised in the preface, or, alternatively, that the critic was possessed by a gentler spirit than mine. I am sure at any rate that artistic work, great or small, should be sternly judged on what it is rather than on what it promises. The late J. Comyns Carr, in the days when he wrote dramatic criticism, let loose this restive truth in a couple of short sentences—'We are told that So-and-so is a promising young actor. Personally I don't care how much he promises so long as he never again performs.'

Let me, then, pass over Mr Gerald Bullett's verses with the simple remark that I believe in them (he himself calls them 'MICE'—no overweening title, however boldly printed. Yet mice were dear to Apollo Smintheus, and his proper emblem): and let me come to the general purpose of this Note.

It is meant to preface a series of small volumes of verse by young writers, mostly Cambridge men. That, since the War, young men in extraordinary numbers have taken to expressing themselves in verse is a plain fact, not to be denied: that they choose, as often as not, to express themselves in 'numbers' extraordinary to us can as hardly be contested. But the point is, they have a crowding impulse to say something; and to say it with the emotional seriousness proper to Poetry. For my part, I love the discipline of verse: but I love the impulse better. Time will soften—I hope not too soon, lest it sugar down and sentimentalise—a certain bitterness of resentment observable in this booklet and its next followers: but, as nothing in verse is nobler than true tradition, anything is more hopeful than convention.

So these booklets have been planned to give youth its chance to make spoons or spoil horns. If anyone object that the print and page over-dignify the content of any one volume in the proposed series, why, that must be a particular criticism, which cannot honestly (I think) be enlarged to blame the publisher's wish, and the care he has taken, that what pretends, however modestly, to be a work of the Muse, should step forth to the public in honourable dress.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH