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

I have a mild grievance against that talented lady, Miss Marjorie Bowen, for labelling her latest novel "a romantic fantasy." Because, like all her other stories, The Cheats (Collins) moves with such an air of truth, its personages are so human, that I could delightfully persuade myself that it was all true, and that I had really shared, with a sometimes quickened pulse, the strange fortunes of the sombre young hero. But—fantasy! That is to show the strings and give away the whole game. However, if you can forget that, the coils of an admirably woven intrigue will grip your attention and sympathy throughout. The central figure is one Jaques, who comes to town as a penniless and love-lorn romantic, to be confronted with the revelation that he is himself the eldest son, unacknowledged but legitimate, of His Majesty King Charles the Second, then holding Court at Whitehall. It is from the plots and counter-plots, the machinations and subterfuges that follow that Miss Bowen justifies her title. Certainly The Cheats establishes her in my mind as our first writer of historical fiction. The character-drawing is admirable (especially of poor weak-willed vacillating Jaques, a wonderfully observed study of the Stuart temperament). More than ever, also, Miss Bowen might here be said to write her descriptions with a paint-brush; the whole tale goes by in a series of glowing pictures, most richly coloured. The Cheats is not a merry book; its treatment of the foolish heroine in particular abates nothing of grim justice; but of its art there can be no two opinions. I wish again that I had been allowed to believe in it.

It must be unusual in war for a commander-in-chief to be regarded by his opponents with the respect and admiration that the British forces in East Africa felt towards Von Lettow-Vorbeck; from General Smuts, who congratulated him on his Order "Pour le MÉrite," down to the British Tommy who promised to salute him "if ever 'e's copped." The fact that Von Lettow held out from August, 1914, till after the Armistice with a small force mainly composed of native askaris, and with hardly any assistance from overseas, is proof in itself of his organizing ability, his military leadership and his indomitable determination. As these are qualities which are valued by his late enemies his story of the campaign, My Reminiscences of East Africa (Hurst and Blackett), should appeal to a large public, especially as it is written on the whole in a sporting spirit and not without some sense of humour. His descriptions of the natural difficulties of the country and the methods he adopted for handling them are interesting and instructive. But in military matters his story is not altogether convincing; for if his "victories" were as "decisive" as he represents them how is it that they were followed almost invariably by retirement? The results are attributed in these pages to "slight mischances" or "unfavourable conditions" or merely to "pressure of circumstances." Would it not have been better, while he was about it, to claim boldly that he was luring us on? This is a question on which one naturally refers to the maps, and it is therefore all the more regrettable that these contain no scale of mileage, an omission which renders them almost meaningless. How many readers, for instance, will realise that German East Africa was almost twice the size of Germany? The translation on the whole is good, though some phrases such as "the at times barely sufficient ration" are rather too redolent of the Fatherland.

I see that on the title-page of his latest story Mr. W. E. Norris is credited with having already written two others (specified by name), etc. Much virtue in that "etc." I cannot therefore regard The Triumphs of Sara (Hutchinson) precisely as the work of a beginner, though it has a freshness and sense of enjoyment about it that might well belong to a first book rather than to—I doubt whether even Mr. Norris himself could say offhand what its number is. Sara and her circle are eminently characteristic of their creator. You have here the same well-bred well-to-do persons, pleasantly true to their decorous type, retaining always, despite modernity of clothes and circumstance, a gentle aroma of late Victorianism. Perhaps Sara is the most immediate of Mr.Norris's heroines so far. Her money-bags had been filled in Manchester, and from time to time in her history you are reminded of this circumstance. It explains much; though hardly her marriage with Euan Leppington, whose attraction apparently lay in being one of the few males of her acquaintance whom Sara did not find it fatally easy to bring to heel. Anyhow, after marriage she quickly grew bored to death of him; so much so that it required an attempt (badly bungled) by another woman to get Euan to elope with her, and a providential collapse of the very unwilling Lothario, to bring about that happy ending that my experience of kind Mr. Norris has taught me to expect. I may add that he has never done anything more quietly entertaining than the frustrated elopement; the luncheon scene at the MÉtropole, Brighton, between the angry but amused Sara and a husband incapacitated by rage, remorse and chill, is an especially well-handled little comedy of manners.

Sir Julian Corbett, in writing the first volume of Naval Operations (Longmans), has carried the semi-official history of the War at sea only as far as the Battle of the Falklands; but if the other three or four volumes—the number is still uncertain—are to be as full of romance as this the complete work will be a library of adventure in itself. Hardly ever turning aside to praise or blame, he says with almost unqualified baldness a multitude of astounding things—things we half knew, or guessed, or longed to have explained, or dared not whisper, or, most of all, never dreamt of. Here is a gold-mine for the makers of boys' books of all future generations to quarry in. Think, for instance, of the liner Ortega shaking off a German cruiser by bolting into an uncharted tide-race near the Horn; or the Southport, left for disabled by her captors, crawling two thousand miles to safety with only half an engine; or the triumphant raider Karlsruhe, her pursuers baffled, full to the hatches with captured luxuries, bands playing, flags flying, suddenly blown up in mid-Atlantic. The game of hide-and-seek, as played by the Emden and her like, naturally figures very largely in a volume which Henty could hardly have bettered. The author's veracious narrative, leaving all picturesque detail to the imagination, gets home every time by the sheer weight of its material. The War in Home waters is no less fascinatingly reconstructed, and the case of maps contains in itself living epics for all who study them with understanding.

In writing her second book Miss Hilda M. Sharp has allowed herself what is, I suspect, the lady novelist's greatest treat, the extraordinary achievement of using the first person singular and making it masculine. She has done it very well too, and I am happy to recall that, in another place, I was among the many who prophesied good concerning her future when she made her dÉbut as a novelist with The Stars in their Courses in Mr. Fisher Unwin's "First Novel Library." A Pawn in Pawn comes very properly from the same publisher. It has one of those plots which it is most particularly a reviewer's business, in the reader's own interest, not to reveal, but it is permissible to explain that the "pawn" of the title is a little girl adopted from an orphanage, where, as someone says, "the orphans aren't really orphans," by Julian Tarrant, whom a select circle acknowledged as the greatest poet that the last years of the nineteenth century produced. Miss Sharp earns my special admiration by getting through the inevitable description of the beginning of the Great War in fewer words than anybody whose attempt I have yet encountered, and steers throughout a pleasant course midway between a "bestseller" and a "high-brow." Lydia, the "pawn," is very charming, but quite possibly so, and though, of course, she must marry one of the three men interested in her adoption Miss Sharp will probably keep most of her readers, as she did me, in doubt as to which it is to be until quite the end of the book. I think that he may prove an acquired taste with most readers; but directly I found that he was apt to quote the reviews in Punch I realised that he was a man of discrimination and deserved his good luck.