There is certainly this to be said of Mr. Hugh Walpole—that, having devised a tale of gloom, he allows no weak consideration for his readers' feelings to deter him from making the worst of it. I write, having but now emerged, blinking a little at the familiar sunlight (yet oddly invigorated too), from a perusal of the four-hundred-and-seventy pages of his Captives (Macmillan). Of course I have nothing like space to detail for you its plot. Summarised, it tells the life of a young woman, Maggie Cardinal, whom one may briefly call the bemused victim of religions—and relations. You never knew any well-intentioned heroine who had such abysmal luck with both. Her clergyman father, a bad hat, who spared us his acquaintance by expiring on the first page; her semi-moribund aunts in their detestable London home; the circle of the Inner Saints, with their intrigues that centred in the ugly little meeting-house; the seaside parish with its spiritually-dead atmosphere, in which Maggie's hopeless married life is spent—all these and more are realised with an art that is almost devastating in its unforced effect. Sometimes I hoped that such universal drabness was too bad to be true; one caught touches of manipulation, times in which these poor Captives seemed bound less by the chains of circumstance than by the wires of Mr. Walpole. The queer result was that I found myself believing in his compellingly human characters, but protesting that such unbroken misfortune could not, or need not, have encompassed them. To take an example, when Maggie's "tipsy" uncle was shown into the Vicarage drawing-room on her "At Home day," no other guests had yet arrived. Surely therefore (save for peremptory orders from Mr. Walpole) she might somehow have removed the culprit to another room, or at least denied herself to subsequent callers, who included (of course) the most influential and scandal-mongering of the parish ladies. That is the kind of rather piled-up agony that made me suspect Mr. Walpole of letting his fortitude get at times the better of his commonsense. But he has written a big book.

Mr. E. F. Benson, of whom it might justly be said that he produces not books but libraries (and the quality of his output under these circumstances remains for me amongst the literary wonders of the age), has been at it again. Hardly have I finished laughing over Queen Lucia, when I find him claiming a wholly different interest with a volume of personal recollections called Our Family Affairs (Cassell). By its theme and treatment this is work standing naturally a little outside criticism; but I can say at once that Mr. Benson has never written with a more sympathetic charm than in these pictures of the childhood of himself and his sister and brothers; of the various scholastic and ecclesiastical homes to which the increasing dignities of that rather alarming parent, the Archbishop, transported his family; and (quite the best and most attractive portrait in the collection) of the mother whom all of them united to adore. There is an actual photograph of her here, taken at the age of twenty, which goes far to explain how she came to be the heroine of the story; the lurking gaiety and laughter of it quaintly foretelling the great ecclesiastical lady who, on one occasion when the Archbishop was absent, could announce to her enraptured children that family prayers should be remitted, "as a treat!" Schooldays at Wellington; Cambridge; some topical memoirs of the Georgian rÉgime in Athens, and (what will interest many readers most of all) the history of the origin of that famous lady, Dodo—these are but a selection from the contents of a volume that should find hosts of friends.

The Girl in Fancy Dress (Hodder and Stoughton) was so very much disguised in one way and another that Anthony, the hero, when he asked her to marry him, even for the second time, was taking considerable risks. The speed of the affair must also have been bewildering. Cynthia, the heiress, arrives on a Thursday to stay with his people, but, having tumbled out of a motor-car into a wet ditch on her way, she is dressed, rather like a stage coster-girl, in garments borrowed from a cottager. Naturally, as of course a nursery-governess is much more likely than an heiress to look like that, Anthony's people mistake her for a poor country cousin who is also expected, and Cynthia, discovering that her host and hostess and their dreary daughters intend the heiress to marry Anthony and, worse than that, that he has called her "the goose with the golden eggs," fosters the mistake and does her best to pay them all out. She leaves on the following Tuesday, but before that Anthony has taken her to one dance as a peasant girl and she has talked to him at another disguised as a green domino, and he has proposed to her as his cousin and withdrawn his declaration when he finds she isn't. Next he sees her as Lady Teazle in amateur theatricals, and then comes his final meeting with her in her proper person, which brings about a satisfactory ending for everyone but Cynthia's other lover. I don't say that all these things couldn't have happened; I only say that as a rule they don't. Apart from that, the bright bustling action of Mrs. J. E. Buckrose's story has a cheerful charm of its own, and Cynthia, as poor relation of one of the anxiously best families in a little country town, provides some amusing situations—for the reader.

If the shade of Robert Louis Stevenson is jealous of its rights and its copyrights, Mr. Jeffrey Farnol may look to be hauled up before the Recording Angel, on his arrival, in the matter of his Black Bartlemy's Treasure (Sampson Low), which he might just as well have called Black Bartlemy's Treasure Island and have done. Never was such frank adoption of ideas; and yet no God-fearing, adventure-loving Englishman will regret it. For all my devotion to R. L. S. I heartily enjoyed this elaboration of his idea, split me (to quote the thorough-going language of it)—split me crosswise else! There are forty-seven chapters and a bloody fight in every one of them, save in the dozen set apart for an interval of refreshment and romance in the middle. Nay, but was not the primitive romance a gentler combat, itself, between Martin Conisby and Lady Joan Brandon, marooned, solitary, upon the Island where they did find (and lose) a treasure even greater than Black Bartlemy's? After having "consorted with pirates and like rogues" and having "endured much of harms and dangers, as battle, shipwreck, prison and solitude," it seemed we had sighted happiness at last. But even at the very end things took an ill turn and our Martin, our dear Martin, is left stranded and in sorry plight. Yet must there be a sequel to this. Had he been left to die on the Island he could not have told us his story thus far; moreover his last word is that the tale is yet to finish. May I be there to hear!

I rather think that the lady who elects to write under the name of O. Douglas did less than justice to the peculiar quality of her own gifts in calling her last story Penny Plain (Hodder and Stoughton). Because really such confectionery as this, covered inches deep with the sweetest and smoothest and pinkest of sugar, could never in these days be bought for many pennies, while as for "plain" ...! Most of the plot (which really isn't at all the right word for such caramel-stuff) takes place in a small Scottish town, where lives a family of book-children, mothered by an elder sister named Jean, all of them rich in char-r-rm but poor in cash. To this town comes, first, a pleasant single lady with a lord for her brother; secondly an aged man full of money; and, because the family (and the tale) is what it is, Jean, in fewer chapters than you would easily credit, has clasped the young lord to her breast and is saying the correct things to the family lawyer of the aged man concerning the responsibilities of being his heiress. So there you have it. I doubt whether anything even temporarily unpleasant so much as suggests itself; for "O. Douglas" has apparently discovered that, in a world still struggling with stale peace-bread, her pink sugar-cakes are not only cheerful to cook but likely to prove highly remunerative.

King Alfred (to shopman). "Ah! I see you stock my patent candle-clocks. How are they selling?"

Shopman. "They're selling like hot—I mean there's quite a run on them, Your Majesty."