as Perpetua experienced, as doubtless with the majority of others of the glorious company, the pain and sting are taken from death. This young woman, a few days after she had borne her second child, was given to the beasts. After having refused successfully to wear the pagan garb of a devotee of Ceres, she was tossed by a 'very savage cow'; and then, being called again to suffer the ordeal, she wanted first to do up her hair, 'for it was not becoming for a martyr to suffer with dishevelled hair, lest she should seem to be mourning in her glory.' Such a detail, proving the natural woman, helps the truth of the narrative. Then, when required again to face the angry bull, she had no knowledge that already she had suffered the ordeal. The reality of the simple tale is strengthened by the efforts of her poor pagan father to save her from the fate she was determined to suffer. A very true saint and woman.

Doubtless well-meant, but yet amazingly wrong in many of its judgments, is Lord Headley's 'The Affinity between the Original Church of Jesus Christ and Islam' (The Mosque, Woking). Propaganda is expected to have bias, but obvious inaccuracy is fatal to it. Muslims . . . have never attempted to promulgate Islamic teachings by means of the sword-we cannot say as much for the Christians,' is one instance of examples innumerable, showing how determined is the blind partiality of this ardent convert to Mohammed. The book bristles with honest misunderstandings and mis-statements. It is an opportunity lost, and the claim of the title is missed. The next book also demonstrates the infinite variety of religious faith and practices. If devotion to an ideal were sufficient, then 'The Philosophy of Ancient Britain' (Williams and Norgate) should be convincing; for its author, Sir John David, shows a confident faith in the spiritual and intellectual nobility of the Druids, entirely honouring to his heart. His book, however, is addressed to the few who accept his assertion in a spirit akin to his own. So little is actually known of the ritual and practices of the Druids that muchand very much-must be left to conjecture. The author does not hesitate, not only to deny the cruelties with which ignorance has charged the Druids-human sacrifice, for instance-but compares their teachings favour

ably with those of the Christian churches. He does this through 'correspondences'-really a most doubtful method when dealing with prehistoric circumstances— and the writings of Swedenborg. To an ordinary plain mind his conclusions appear too far-fetched. We only wish that his earnestness and evident honesty of intention and thought could restore the details and principles of the teachings of the Druids; for, to some degree, all of British race must be interested in those ancient fathers of our civilisation. With all its daring and learning this volume does not achieve the result it aims at.

Mr Hugh A. Law's account of 'Anglo-Irish Literature' (Longmans) is welcome as a fair and interesting, if not very original, study, which cannot fail to bring sympathetically closer Great Britain and what it is to be hoped still may be called the sister isle. Rightly so, in the case of that nation of political orators the recorded spoken word is accepted as a part of Ireland's literary heritage; but, of course, the most lasting inspiration comes from the poets, romanticists, essayists, playwrightsSwift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, Sheridan, Burke and others. Through the magic of language, through our own beautiful tongue, used by the masters, even wounds of long standing may be healed; and this book is a reminder of the debts owed to writers of the past which the writers to come may increase happily.

In 'The Gorgon's Head' (Macmillan) Sir James Frazer has brought together some of the writings, addresses and prefaces which do not fit into the great body of his enduring work as folk-lorist and anthropologist. They are generally already well known to his followers. His vivid studies of Roman Life in the time of the young Pliny and of London Life in the time of Addison appeared originally in these pages; while his brilliant renewal of the history of Sir Roger de Coverley, in this volume somewhat enlarged, has already received the admiring tributes of those who know their Addison. So good is this, and the accompanying study of William Cowper, that each of these parts of the present book might well have been issued separately, with black-andwhite illustrations by some true successor of the late Hugh Thomson. We venture to offer the suggestion.

The

The preparation of any Anthology is bound to be disappointing to somebody; and, therefore, to that extent, ungratefully received. Mr J. C. Squire, no novice in this minor department of literature, was, as they say, asking for trouble in gathering and issuing Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets' (Cambridge University Press). Lesser Poets! He has safeguarded himself by limiting his choice to those who are dead and in their minority secure. It is amusing to notice that he has left Andrew Lang alone; for once upon a time Lang was made cheerfully indignant by discovering himself listed in a monthly article as one of the minor poets of his day. In any case, he deserves to have been mentioned in this work; but it is ungrateful to look for omissions in a volume of this compass. It has good things and not so good things. Obviously verse is included here which might well have been omitted, and poets are left out which might well have been chosen; but it is needless to complain. Mr Squire has done his work with liberality and industry; and has produced a book for browsing in comfortably and generously skipping.

Not for the first time the stale conventions of the West have been relieved and reinforced by the imaginative stimulations of the East; and the advent of Mrs Vennette Herron from Java to the ranks of our fictionists is welcome. She has the gifts of the born story-teller. Her work has imagination, passion, energy, rhythm and colour; and her volume of stories, 'Peacocks' (Murray), promises to be the forerunner of a highly successful literary output. The best of her seven tales is 'The Chinese Bed'; for in this, with vivid suggestions and ample play of colour, she leaves most to the imagination; but every one of the tales is excellent in itself and an admirable foil to the others. Already she has made her mark distinctively and ensured a ready interest in her future work.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 494.-OCTOBER, 1927.

Art. 1. THE CHARACTERS OF NAPOLEON AND WELLINGTON COMPARED.

1. A Great Man's Friendship. By Lady Burghclere. Murray, 1927.

2. Napoleon. By Emil Ludwig. George Allen & Unwin,

1927.

3. Napoleon. The Last Phase. By Lord Rosebery. A. L. Humphreys, 1900.

4. The Life of Wellington. By Sir Herbert Maxwell. Two vols. Sampson Low, 1899.

5. Jadis: 1 et 2° Série. By Frédéric Masson. Paris: Ollendorff, 1906.

'You should make your portrait,' says Leonardo in one of his note-books, 'at the hour of the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light is then perfect'; and the great painter's advice embodies an aesthetic as well as a technical truth. Had I died on the throne, surrounded by all the emblems of power,' observed Napoleon to Las Cases, 'I should have remained a riddle to many. To-day the wrappings have been stripped from me; thanks to my misfortunes, every one can judge me in my nakedness.' In this latter opinion Lord Rosebery cautiously concurs: We have more chance of seeing the man Napoleon at St Helena than at any other period of his career.'

Two books that have lately appeared provoke one to look again at the two most arresting figures cast up by the greatest European War before our own and to contemplate and contrast them in their last phases, as the sea-mists gather around Walmer and Longwood and Vol. 249.-No. 494.

the light gains that subtle charm which gives both to the figures and the background their surest values. Herr Ludwig's contribution to the study of Napoleon is, indeed, of a very different character to that of Lady Burghclere in respect of Wellington. The former is a piece of psychology which assembles, with unerring skill and a far-flung net, a mass of more or less familiar material bearing upon the Emperor's personality; the latter no more than a collection of letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, to a young lady but lately married. Yet, for all that, this ill-assorted pair of books may serve in harness to draw the effigies of these two great captains across the stage. For there are enough of those 'slight things like a phrase or jest' which, as Plutarch urges, often make a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall,' discoverable in a miscellany, esteemed by the late Lord Curzon to be of as much interest as any private collection of Wellington's correspondence, even if not so many as in Herr Ludwig's star-spangled pages.

These last letters of the Great Duke were written to one who only passed off the stage at the close of the last century. Lady Salisbury as she was at the time she received them, Lady Derby as she ultimately became, was entirely worthy of the good fortune that gave her Wellington as a correspondent. As a girl she had worshipped the hero of Waterloo with marks of unusual devotion, even at a date when it was the right and proper thing for young ladies to do. She made relics of the very gloves that his hands had touched, to say nothing of the handkerchiefs that from time to time he freely bestowed upon her; these latter articles always accompanying him, as the letters show, in such abundance that he was in a position to thrust into the Queen's hands, during the simultaneous progress of a royal concert and a royal cold, no less than three, and even to afford Her Majesty the option of a fourth. Lady Salisbury's extravagance of admiration found, after she became a mother, a new outlet. Each of her elder children, no matter what its sex, received the name of Arthur in memory of him whom to her dying day she

The important and interesting letter of Sept. 8, 1852, was freely quoted from by Gleig.