NOTES ON NEW BOOKS

1. A Book of Memory. The Birthday Book of the Blessed Dead. Compiled by Katharine Tynan (Katharine Tynan Hinkson). London: Hodder and Stoughton. [Price 6s. net.]

Mrs. Hinkson has in this exquisite volume gathered together "the most beautiful thoughts of the most beautiful souls concerning death." Each of the ample quarto pages is divided into two columns, of which the right-hand one is left blank for the names of the departed friends and any note that one may wish to enter, while the other column assigns to each day of the year in due order, two days upon each page, a text from Sacred Scripture and extracts from two poets-though pretty often the second extract is in prose. These are all chosen, by no means at haphazard but with extreme care and skill, from true poets, old and new, and often by permission from copyright sources. Many will regret that two or three pages at the end do not tell us where the various poets are quoted in the preceding pages. The moderate price put on so large and elegant a volume shows that the publishers count on a very wide public, and they will not be disappointed. Besides being a book of piety and consolation, it is a book of pure literature. "If the book is happy enough to give to even one other bereaved heart the calm and the hopeful joy in the face of death which it has given to the compiler, it will be indeed blessed." This concluding sentence of the touching" foreword" is sure to be verified superabundantly.

2. In Tuscany. Tuscan Towns, Tuscan Types, and the Tuscan Tongue. By Montgomery Carmichael. Third Edition. London: Burns and Oates. (Price 6s. net.)

Mr. Montgomery Carmichael has made northern Italy his own or rather the special subject of this delightful volume, Tuscany. It has been his home for very many years, and his fine literary gifts enable him to give effective expression to the affection with which the country has inspired him. The author, in the Preface to the new edition grieves that his book is "so slender"; but it is a handsome and portly volume of nearly four hundred pages, with some fifty illustrations, and the price fixed upon it is moderate.

3. An Open Letter on the Decay of Faith. By Hilaire Belloc, M.P. London: Burns and Oates. [Price One Penny].

Several brilliant young men of letters contrived to make their way into Parliament at the last Election. Two of these are Mr. C. F. G. Masterman and Mr. Belloc, author of The Path to Rome, one of the most delightful works of genius that the new century has yet produced. Mr. Masterman, it seems, has expressed his opinion lately that the fight between Faith and Unbelief has gone hopelessly against the former. In a very eloquent letter the Catholic Member for Salford combats this opinion. We should like to quote the passage in which the history of the Irish race is appealed to as a victory of the Faith. A vignette portrait of Mr. Belloc is well reproduced on the titlepage of this tiny brochure.

4. A Modern Pilgrim's Progress. With an Introduction by Henry Sebastian Bowden of the Oratory. London: Burns and Oates. [Price 6s.]

An Introduction of twenty pages from the pen of the present Superior of the London Oratory predisposes the reader in favour of this Apologia, which is one of the most interesting and most valuable of a department of religious literature to which many gifted men have contributed. The "Pilgrim" is a woman evidently of talent and position, who is not revealed here even by initials. In twenty-seven chapters she describes, in a manner that ensures attention and sympathy, her wanderings through various mazes of unbelief and error, and her slow and painful struggles towards the truth. A great many interesting names occur in almost every chapter, and the things said and written by these persons make one more curious to know the name of the author herself. One asks also if she was the only one of her family to embrace the Faith. Her book will, we hope, help many to follow her example.

5. Not a Judgment. By Grace Keon. Benziger: New York. [Price 5s.].

Those who are acquainted with current American literature have come to regard Miss Grace Keon as one of the most promising Catholic writers of fiction. The volume of her short stories to which "The Ruler of the Kingdom" was full of variety, interest, pathos and humour, all set forth by a pure and attractive style. Her new work is a full-length novel of incident and character,

high-toned and often eloquent, developing an interesting story which makes us intimately acquainted with several persons who are worth knowing. It seems to us to be the finest piece of work of this kind that we have had for some years from the other side of the Atlantic; but we speak only of the books issued by Catholic publishers, to which our reading is confined. This evidently young writer has already at her disposal so much thought, feeling, and power of expression as to make us expect from her in the future much admirable work. We advise our readers to become her readers.

6. The Story and Song of Black Roderick. By Dora Sigerson, London: Alexander Moring, Ltd.

Mrs. Clement Shorter has done wisely in putting her maiden name on the newest of her many title-pages; but indeed both of her names have very interesting associations. Her youthful volume of Verses has been followed by The Fairy Changeling and other Poems, My Lady's Slipper and other Poems, and Ballads and Poems. With these four books of verse, which do not exhaust her poetical work, she has given at least four prose books-The Father Confessor, As Sparks Fly Upward, The Country-house Party, and now The Story and Song of Black Roderick, which, as the title implies, is both prose and verse. This enumeration of Mrs. Shorter's writings is in itself a proof that our gifted countrywoman has made her mark in contemporary literature. A great part of her power lies in her fidelity to her true original vocation. She is still Dora Sigerson. She stands apart with themes of her own and a style of her own steadfast to her own ideals, and thus winning a distinct place in the literature of the time. An evidently competent critic finds in her new book "a quite original imagination and the most delicate and refined literary skill." The story of Black Roderick is in musical prose of a very dainty and subtle simplicity, broken now and then by a short ballad, "lest thou grow weary of my prose," as the story-teller says constantly with a pleasant monotony. A Celtic feeling runs through it all. The plot towards the end comes too close to that of "The Woman who went to Hell," and I do not care much for that wild, unorthodox legend which in this newest form of it is made to end very sweetly with another old fancy about the robin and his breast of red.

7. The Expiation of Lady Anne. By Letitia Selwyn Oliver. London: Henry J. Drane.

Many of Miss Oliver's readers will be interested by the.variety and strangeness of the incidents of the story which is here told in two hundred and sixty pages of very large type; but we cannot help disliking what the author has expressly designed -the violent contrast between weird supernatural experiences and the vulgar commonplaces of ordinary life. The heroine, waiting at Charing Cross station, sees in a dream things that happened, I think, a hundred years before; and then in the next page two ladies lunch at Harrod's and go on a round of shopping which they might do without leaving Harrod's-and an Irish servant, Biddy, asks, "Shall you be after wanting anything more, Miss?" It is a pity that English writers do not get some Irish friend to edit the conversation of their Irish characters and eliminate impossible idioms like this of Biddy's. The Expiation of Lady Anne is intended to point an edifying moral, and it is, as we have said, full of exciting incident, but, like many popular novels of the day, it is not, we must confess, much to our taste.

8. Saint Columba. By Samuel Keyworth. London: Burn s and Oates. [Price 2s. 6d. net].

This interesting volume has no date of publication on the title page, and not a word of preface, such as a work of the kind really needs. Mr. Samuel Keyworth, whose name is quite new to us, seems to have made himself personally acquainted with some of the scenes and places connected with his Saint, and many of his chapters are interesting and valuable; but we doubt his qualifications to discuss several of the subjects that he introduces, and the literary form of his work in many places leaves much to be desired. It is a handsomely printed volume of two hundred pages.

9. Tom Losely: Boy. By the Rev. J. E. Copus, S.J. Benziger: New York. [Price 3s. 6d.]

Father Copus, who very properly has given up his nom de guerre of "Cuthbert," is rivalling Father Finn in the number of his stories for boys. His new volume does not advance another stage in the career of his youthful heroes, but goes back nearer to the nursery than Shadows Lifted and its two predecessors. Tom, with his not very happily chosen surname, gets into all

sorts of childish scrapes and runs through sundry adventures, so early in life that the last chapter of this book describes the resolutions that he made on the day of his First Communion. Father Copus lets us know towards the end that probably we shall hear more of Tom Losely.

10. Aubanel, the publisher so long established at Avignon in France, has recently brought out a French translation of The City of Peace, by the Rev. Henry Browne, S.J., published by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland-La Cité de la Paix d'aprés le temoignage de ceux qui y sont Revenus. These narratives of their conversions by Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B.; Father Darlington, S.J.; Miss Alice Wilmot Chetwode, Mrs. Bartle Teeling, Father Browne himself, and others, will, we trust, help to confirm the work of many through the medium of its new language, and also in the translation which an Italian firm have obtained leave to publish of what they truly style un aureo lavoro.

II. A Lad of the O'Friels. By Seumas MacManus. [Price 2s. 6d.]

The title-page adds "Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, James Duffy and Co.," and a card from the former firm says that the price is half-a-crown. This is extremely cheap for so richly bound and well printed a volume of more than three hundred pages, containing a great variety of admirable sketches of Irish peasant life as really lived in one of the most primitive and most picturesque districts of Ireland. Seumas MacManus, the husband of "Ethna Carbery," has himself written many beautiful lyrics and many delightful Irish stories, humorous or pathetic. A Lad of the O'Friels is the longest narrative he has attempted, and indeed this book also embodies many sketches that might stand apart, such as the thirty pages describing a pilgrimage to Lough Dearg, which ends with the words and music of the hymn wherewith pilgrims take their leave of the holy island.

12. Irish Catholics and Trinity College. By the Rev. J. F. Hogan, D.D., Canon of Killaloe. Dublin: Browne and Nolan [Price 25. net.]

Canon Hogan is Professor of Modern Languages in Maynooth College, and Editor of The Irish Ecclesiastical Record in which portions of his present work have appeared. Though it takes