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

Doubtless you will think, as I did at first, that the title of The Priceless Thing (Stanley Paul) has reference to love or something intense like that. Far from it. Not in fifty guesses would you be likely to discover that its real meaning is an autograph of the late William Shakspeare. One knew already that Mrs. Maud Stepney Rawson could write a vigorous and bustling tale. If I have a complaint to make against The Priceless Thing it is indeed that it suffers from some superfluity of plot, and what approaches a plethora of villains, real or supposed. For this reason it is a story more than usually hard to condense fairly into a paragraph. Briefly, however, the P. T., which was the peculiar treasure of the noble line of Annerslie, lived in a case in the library of their ancestral home. The heroine, Anstice, a relation of the Family, was employed by My Lord as librarian. When I tell you, moreover, that Anstice had run away from her own father on finding that he was an expert manufacturer of literary forgeries, and that her circle of friends included an American blackmailer, a curiosity dealer and a mad Italian who was even better at the forgery business than her own father, you will perceive that the poor girl was likely to find her situation "some job." I could not begin to tell you what really happened. Towards the end there had been so much mystery, and the story had become such a palimpsest of forged signatures, that I myself knew no more than Lord Annerslie in which to believe. But I think we both had the upholding conviction that an affair of this kind was bound to come out all right in the end. Which indeed it did; leaving all the virtuous characters abundantly satisfied, a feeling that will, I am sure, be shared by Mrs. Rawson's maze-loving public.

Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr. H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude skill. It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties.

Mr. Grant-Watson is one of the most resolute and intrepid novelists I have met, and his directness of speech may give offence, I fear, to the more reticent of his readers. His story of two white men and Alice Desmond, freed from the social conventions and let loose among the natives on a remote island in the Pacific, proceeds apace and with little regard for the susceptibilities of civilisation and refinement. Familiar but rarely printed language is used when occasion demands; primitive passions stalk naked and unashamed; and when murder is to be done it is done brutally, forthwith and notwithstanding the respective merits, from an heroic point of view, of active and passive agents. Being myself so situated in life that I am never likely to take part in any affair more passionate and drastic than a football match or a law-suit, I found the savage reality, the candour and the unbridled wrath of Where Bonds are Loosed (Duckworth) most welcome by contrast. It gave me pleasure to see a man's annoyance being worked off by the use of fists, knives and bullets, a woman's impatience spending itself in immediate violence, and love and hatred being expressed in sharp and decisive action rather than in deliberate subtleties of conversation. In short, Mr. Watson left me wondering, somewhat fondly, to what lengths I myself might go in my more heated moments if I too were isolated on Kanna Island and beyond the supervision of police-constables and next-door neighbours.

Once upon a time it was my lot to read a slender volume of Prose Poems, all about stars and rivers and moons and such other things of which prose poetry is made, and written by the most intense and soulful young woman who ever put pen to paper. Which, being perused, I handed to another and elder woman, noted for a great reader of books. And after many days, and after (I suppose) much fruitless toil on the part of my friend, the volume was returned to me with this single comment, "It seems very racily written." I tell you the story, which being true is without point, because I have been wondering what the same critic would have found to say about another slender booklet called The Word of Teregor (Nisbet). My idea of it is that Mr. Guy Ridley, the author, knows and admires his Kipling and delights in his Maeterlinck to such extent that (possibly after a visit to The Blue Bird) he felt himself inspired to sit down and write these Forest-Jungle-Book tales of an earlier world, wherein Man and Beast and all created things were subject to the benevolent rule of Teregor, the Oak-tree; when everything living had a voice and used it, pleasantly enough, in rather mannered prose of the "Yea, Nay and Behold" type; and when all the old legends had yet to be started in ways of which Mr. Ridley gives his own most original explanations. So if you care about this kind of thing (and I had quite a pleasant half-hour from it myself) get it. You will at least find here a book entirely different from anything else in the library-box; printed in type that is a pleasure to the eye, and having, moreover, the classic excuse of being a very little one.

I have for some time watched a steady improvement in the work of Mr. Ralph Straus. It is therefore a pleasure to greet The Orley Tradition (Methuen) as his best yet. The Orley tradition was to do nothing whatever, and, like the House of Lords in Iolanthe, to do it very well. They were, as a family, noble, of ancient lineage, and fine stupidity. John Orley, the hero of the tale, starts out to follow worthily in the footsteps of his race, as a brainless but agreeable country magnate. Then comes an accident, which thwarts his physical ambitions and awakens his mental. Thereafter he essays the life of affairs—and fails all round; is defeated for Parliament, and equally worsted in the lists of Art. So, being now recovered of his hurt, he says a graceful farewell to the career intellectual and resumes the traditional Orley existence. This, in brief, is his story; but I give it without the pleasant style of Mr. Straus's telling. There are many very happily touched scenes; more especially had I a guilty sympathy roused by one in which poor John endeavours to concentrate his very slipshod brains upon an afternoon of hard reading. And almost all the characters are alive, from the entertaining old lady who keeps the village post-office to Mrs. Adderson, the naughty novelist in whose hands John Orley completed his sentimental education. As for the setting, I fancy that those who have spent their summers round about St. Margaret's Bay will have little difficulty in identifying Handsfield. Altogether a happy book (more so than you would expect from its theme) and one that marks, as I said, the further advance of a ready and agreeable writer.

AT THE GLADIATORIAL AGENCY.

Manager. "But, my dear Sir, you don't seem to have the physique for an engagement of this kind!"

Applicant. "That's just it. You see, I've been rather run down for some time, and my doctor advised me to take a turn or two in the arena for the sake of my health."