(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)

I have reason to believe that Scotland Yard has on occasion displayed considerable intelligence, and I regret that novelists will never allow it to be as cunning even as myself in guessing the identity of the villains of their criminal plots. Mrs. Charles Bryce, for instance, might, without unduly taxing the imagination, have credited the Force with the coup of bringing to justice the murderer of Mrs. Vanderstein, but she went out of her way to employ that marvellous amateur, Mr. Gimblet, for the purpose. I must believe that he was marvellous, because she says so; but in this case he did nothing and had little opportunity of justifying his references. He merely believed what he had the luck to be told and caused the miscreant to be arrested when of his own motion he practically offered himself for arrest. There are, after all, two phases of crime—the first, its commission, and the second, its detection. Mrs. Bryce would have done better to confine herself to the former, since she has an exciting tale to tell of Mrs. Vanderstein's Jewels (Lane) and shows herself well able to curdle the blood in the telling of it. But, lacking that gift of logic which is essential to the stating and the solving of detective problems, she endeavours to achieve her ends by keeping back what are admitted, and not discovered, facts. She is reduced to telling the same story twice, and I cannot say that I was nearly as excited the second time as I was the first.

Once upon a time King James, being annoyed with the City because it wouldn't lend him money, summoned the Lord Mayor and Aldermen to his presence and, "being somewhat transported," threatened to remove his Court to some other place. To this the Lord Mayor very politely but readily retorted, "Your Majesty hath power to do what you please and your City of London will obey accordingly: but she humbly desires that when your Majesty shall remove your Court you would please to leave the Thames behind you." I think this single instance from the history of the City goes far to explain that peculiar pride in it which the Londoner instinctively feels without exactly knowing why. I have not space to argue with Sir Laurence Gomme upon his main point, its continuity of policy and purpose from the Roman Empire till to-day, shown by the records of London's past. I leave it to the scholar and antiquary. It is my purpose to persuade the man in the street, to whom the names of Palgrave, Freeman and Stubbs are not household words, to buy a copy of London (Williams and Norgate) for inclusion in his permanent library. If I should insist upon his reading it then and there he would reply, as one ignorant fellow to another, that he had not the necessary understanding of the remote past and was too preoccupied with the affairs of the present. Be it so, but none the less let him buy it and at any rate glance at its many curious and admirable illustrations. Later he will dip into it in search of further episodes after the manner of that I quote, and lastly he will do the thing thoroughly, to find that he is much more concerned with the past than ever he supposed; that now he understands that "greatness which is London," and that he is infinitely obliged for the recommendation of a not-too-learned clerk who shared his own diffidence, even reluctance, in approaching so learned and weighty a treatise.

I am sure that Miss Constance Holme has, in The Lonely Plough (Mills and Boon), written a clever and amusing novel. What she has not done is to make herself intelligible. Some of the mist that enwraps the background of her frontispiece has obscured her story and her characters. I know that she is writing about lively and entertaining people because there emerges, now and then, a page of dialogue that is witty and alive; and I know that her story is dramatic because she tells us now that someone "let out a screech," and now that he "uttered sharp little sounds remarkably like oaths." I know, too, that the sea is encroaching upon somebody's dwelling-place, and that someone else tries to keep the waves in their place, but is no more successful than was the great King Knut of blessed memory. Then there is a fine figure of a land-agent and several ladies who talk the snappiest of slang. But the mist and the sea have swept across Miss Holme's pages and blotted out the rest of the affair. Not Meredith nor Robert Browning at their most complex have been more baffling. I must admit, however, that the description of a game of mixed hockey, somewhere in the middle of the book, was delightfully fresh and vivid. Here, for a page or two, I could rest from my grapplings with the story and join in all the excitement and peril, that mixed hockey provides. Then there is Harriet, who says, "Stow all that piffle." I should like to know more about Harriet, who from that brief glimpse of her seems a lively vigorous person, but the encroaching sea swallows her with the others, and there is an end. I repeat that Miss Holme has written a clever dramatic story, but the title is certainly the clearest thing about it.

When Mr. Calthrop's at his best

He weaves you tales of fauns and elves,

And ancient gods come back to test

Their humour on our modern selves;

He finds romance in common clay;

He lifts the veil from fairy rings,

And points the unfamiliar way

Of looking at familiar things.