Together Henry James Forman and Frederick R. Gruger explored the "toe of the boot that is Italy" and together they have made of "Grecian Italy" (Boni, Liveright) a notable addition to the ideal Italian library. Mr. Forman's intimate narrative of the experiences of two seasoned vagabonds in this Old World region may be complete in itself, but Mr. Gruger's score of illustrations in color and halftone charge the volume with life and romance and give one a vivid picture of donkeys and orange carts, Greek ruins, Moorish columns, and staircase streets. The reader roams about the sun dried plains of Calabria, lingers, possibly too long, in the land of the Lotus Eaters, takes a trip to Malta, and stands in wonder before Taormina and the golden cities of Sicily. Mr. Forman has found a veritable museum of antiquity in this region where Hellenic culture was first transmitted to the Romans, and proves himself at once an instructive and entertaining guide. Let no one say that he has not fallen under the spell of the land where retired bankers go to rub shoulders with Theocritus and anyone at all may take a spiritual bath in the fabled Fountains of Arethusa.

Certainly if anyone should believe firmly in the happy ending, that person is Kathleen Norris. Now at the noontide of life, with the bounteous fruits of her years of writing around her, she has written her own story, as full of vigorous joy in living and unshaken faith in human kind as any fiction story she ever wrote. "Noon" (Doubleday, Page) is a mixture of autobiography, philosophy, humor, with her never failing emphasis on the importance of motherhood in a woman's life. Perhaps no incident is as engrossing as the tale of the writing of “Mother”, her first real success. The

birth, development, and final flowering of a novel is always a fascinating saga of the artist's life, and Mrs. Norris tells the story as expertly and sympathetically as she has so often told of the beginnings and endings of mortal children. We get the full flavor of her first struggles in New York, when her husband, now the recognized author of several estimable novels of modern life, was bringing in the only regular income of the family, twenty five dollars a week on an editorial job. We feel her courage, her joy in the friendships that began in the metropolis, and her dogged persistence in the face of discouragements. From the experiences of her newspaper days in California she gained the facility and speed that enables her to turn out an astonishingly large bulk of writing every year. But it was from life itself that she gleaned the heart and soul of her work.

Some biographers live in a world far removed from that of the man whose life and art they seek to interpret. They read copiously, they collect, assimilate, revalue and discard, they produce an intellectual piece of work, objectively conceived and painlessly delivered. Others feel a spiritual kinship to the object of their literary study and, through similarity of life, environment, or philosophy, give of themselves generously and without stint. With them the writing of a biography or critical essay is a subjective experience fraught with emotion and deepest significance. It is the next thing to writing an autobiography - and the reader to appreciate the work before him must know something of the biographer. To this class belongs George Gissing, whose twenty two novels dealing with the under side of London life stamp him as one of the grimmest and most authentic of Eng

lish realists. Gissing knew London slums with a dreadful intimacy. They constituted his life, or a large part of it. Most of the time he was in abject penury. He wrote from the simple but compelling necessity of keeping body and soul together, yet one knows that he would still have written had he been a prince rather than a pauper, so sincere was his art and so genuine his craftsmanship. Although living among the denizens of lower London, Gissing hated poverty and wrote, possibly with a trace of bitterness: "I am no friend of the people." All this and much more should be known before one reads his "Charles Dickens" (Dodd, Mead), written in 1898 and now reissued. His picture of Dickens is highly colored with pigments snatched here and there from his own experience; it is by no means photographic. In the chapter devoted to "Comparisons" Gissing says: "Twenty years ago a familiar topic for debating societies was a comparison of the literary characteristics of Dickens and Thackeray." The thought comes quite naturally that debating societies today, if any survive, might with profit spend an hour comparing Dickens and Gissing. Or should we say contrasting?

Under the psychological test of association of ideas, no doubt many folk, if given the work "Turk", would at once reply with "unspeakable" or "atrocity". Yet, almost without exception, competent English and American observers who have lived much among them speak well of the Turks. In any case, the average citizen has small acquaintance with facts about the Turk. This state of affairs makes such an enlightening volume as that prepared by Professor Eliot Grinnell Mears entitled "Modern Turkey" (Macmillan) peculiarly valuable. His

own attitude is as judicially impartial as can be, and his volume contains numerous contributions from others giving various points of view, including those of Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. He supplements these with extensive extracts from select official documents (seventy pages in small type) down to the Treaty of Lausanne. His purpose is to explain the many and often conflicting factors which are at work today in the politico-economic life of the very new Turkish Republic elements of race, religion, economic and agricultural conditions, and international political relationships. The latter part of the book deals with the Young Turk movement and recent history, chiefly as to international complications, culminating in the Kemalist success. The volume is liberally illustrated and contains several excellent maps. It also has an extensive bibliography and a good index.

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Victorian Poetry, edited by C. E. Andrews and M. O. Percival of Ohio State University (R. G. Adams), is a collection made for teachers and students. It contains the most liberal selections of Tennyson and Browning to be found in any similar anthology, and it gives the delicious "Goblin Market" of Christina Rossetti. Meredith and Houseman are there; Swinburne and Dowson. Oscar Wilde has not been included. This is an excellent collection, offering not only the best known poems of the Victorian era but also the work which represents their historical development. There is, too, a group of humorous verse.

There is something about university press publications, in respect both to format and subject matter, that puts them quite in a class by themselves, and surely no exception to the general

rule is the pair of slender volumes which bear the imprint of the University of Chicago Press. "Germany in Transition" and "The Stabilization of Europe" contain lectures given at the University of Chicago during the summer of 1924 on the Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation to aid the "promotion of a better understanding on the part of American citizens of the other peoples of the world". The former is the work of Herbert Kraus, a Königsberg professor who was assigned as expert to the German Foreign Office during the making of the Versailles Treaty. The latter comes from Charles de Visscher, an authority on international law and editor of the "Revue de Droit International". "Germany in Transition" revolves quite naturally around the general question of reparations, discussing as well the Treaty, the League of Nations, and the new German constitution, and does not sidestep the issue of assigning the responsibility for the war. International cooperation, based upon economic solidarity, is Professor de Visscher's plea. He further treats, in some detail, the problems of nationalities and military security and other interrelated topics. The volumes are of particular value to Americans in that they are the work of foreigners whose background and experience do not countenance a purely academic discussion.

writings and therefore varies almost from page to page. For Mr. Coblentz seems not to have discriminated among the men he has read, and so Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant is a scientist no less than Edwin Grant Conklin, and Brooks Adams is to be quoted no less than Bertrand Russell or Edward Alsworth Ross. On the one hand, then, Mr. Coblentz is correct in pointing out that man may be wiped out not only by changes in the natural physical environment but by the adverse conditions of his own creation already referred to; on the other hand, from the strictly scientific point of view his evidence for the mental deterioration of the race is not worth serious consideration, comprising as it does the results of so called intelligence tests, which do not distinguish between what is inherited and what is taught; the lugubrious statistics of Stoddard and Company on the failure of the "best intellectual stocks" to reproduce, which is open to the same criticism since it assumes that intellect is hereditary; and finally such an utterly naive procedure as counting the number of supposedly great men in successive periods.

There is spaciousness and a rare biblical quality in some of the "Poems" (Yale University Press) of Charlton Miner Lewis, and a paradoxical lightness of touch in others. Certainly they are derivative, and from many widely separated sources, yet many are so beautifully fashioned, with the loving skill of an artizan who cares for his medium, that we may sometimes overlook the lack of spontaneity. Poetry such as this, collected as a tribute and commemoration to one who walked in academic ways, is as fitting a monument as any. It is one man's creative urge speaking in the

eternal voices of the past. It must not be said, however, that this little volume fails to add some coin to the treasure of poetic thought. "Israfel", striking as it does the vibrant keynote of the author's age, might well become a pattern for the sonnet makers, and the translations and adaptations from the French and Anglo-Saxon are smooth and vigorous. The occasional poems are, after all, only occasional poems, and as such offend present day canons of taste. The one long poem in the book, "Gawayne and the Green Knight", is an amusing performance, though for all its facility hardly worth the doing.

Intended for popular, non-scholastic consumption, Edgcumbe Staley's "The Tragedies of the Medici" (Brentano) is nothing but a reassembling of known historic data in an easily readable form. It is just another contribution to a take-it-on-the-run age, making history as easily absorbed as prepared. foods. It offers only one more conversational asset for those who would seem learned without learning.

After reading "Eastward" (Doran) by Louis Couperus we have come once more to the conclusion that the so called "travel book" can best be written, not by the inveterate traveler who sets about to describe what he sees, but by the man of letters who can endow the unfamiliar scene with the observations and the literary experience of a lifetime. The one is comfortably concerned with externals, while the other we are thinking of Hearn, Symonds, Henry James, Howells, and Hopkinson Smith as well as Couperus uses a trip as the means of sharpening his perceptions and arriving at conclusions never to be reached at home. For instance, on his

last journey, eastward to Sumatra and to Java, the scene of his boyhood, Couperus took little account of politics, tea and coffee plantations, tobacco production, population statistics, and general industrial development. It was the shadowy mysticism of the Orient, the essential differences which permeate human kind, the strange humanity of people everywhere, and the wild, symbolic beauty of the East which engaged his pen and which supplied the essence of a series of letters sent back to his beloved Holland for publication. His amiable philosophy, the charm of his prose, and the imaginative quality of all his work make one eager for the translation of several of his earlier books that have not yet reached English and American readers. The volume is fully illustrated, yet the reproduction of the illustrations fails to do justice to the subjects photographed and the book is without an index.

Good verse need not be great verse. Faith Baldwin's "Sign Posts" (Small, Maynard) marks no new era in poetry, but its contents are companionable reading, verse that is easy flowing but not jingly about subjects that are sympathetically close to the heart. There is a certain familiarity about her lines that is comforting. The verses sometimes echo the note of this or that singer whom we have come to know and admire but it is no disgrace to possess a craftsmanship that can produce new work and put into it something of the deftness learned from another. Miss Baldwin has written verses that can be read with pleasure and then reread.

H. M. Bateman, the cartoonist, is a byword in England, and certainly ought to be here. His "A Mixture"

(Dial) is thoroughly satisfying the perfect pick-me-up for a mind harassed by ultrasophistication in life and literature. The book is all pictures, pen and ink with plenty of space around them, the only words being the terse captions. And how deliciously funny the pictures are - not so much in their meanings, some of which are significant only to the British, as in their lines and keen observation of the human form and features in all phases. Among the most amusing are those depicting the life of the one note man (the important musician who contributes one solitary note in an orchestra) from awakening to bedtime; a sympathetic tax collector on his rounds, weeping his eyes out; and the sad tale of the Man Who Watched the Speedometer. Bateman has a positive genius for portraying laughs, from the inane smile to the guffaw. They are infectious. Drink the "Mixture" if you too want to tickle your diaphragm.

The title of Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy's fine work, "Bird Islands of Peru" (Putnam), is somewhat misleading. This serious volume not only contains an absorbing and scientific study of the prolific bird life of the Peruvian Islands, but represents a complete summary of information regarding the west coast of South America. Exhaustive scientific data are given concerning the oceanography of the Humboldt Current, this "cold ocean river" of the tropics, with the strange abundance and distribution of life under its influence. The great guano industry, based on the conservation of animal life, forms an important chapter, together with a description of the guanay, or Peruvian cormorant, the "most valuable bird in the world". Dr. Murphy, who is assistant director of the Museum of Natural History, has

compiled a work invaluable to the natural scientist, and of greatest interest to the layman. Detailed descriptions are given of innumerable species of wild life found on these islands and in their waters. There are also vivid and colorful pictures of the natives, their picturesque fisheries, the ancient Incas, and the remnants of primitive life in Peru. The volume contains an introduction by Dr. Frank M. Chapman and is illustrated with unusually attractive photographs.

Ethel Colburn Mayne's "Byron" (Scribner) is fat and beautiful, after the manner of all English books of criticism or biography which our American publishers import. It is a detailed, minute, scholarly work not at all for the reader of "outlines". For a quick view of Byron's life the little "Life" by J. Nichol remains excellent and readable, and for literary estimates we have the essays of Matthew Arnold, Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Georg Brandes, not to speak of Ernest Hartley Coleridge in the invaluable and ubiquitous Encyclopædia Britannica. But the Mayne volume is for the student, the Byron enthusiast, indeed, one might say for the scandal hunter. For the book, originally issued in 1912, has been brought up to date so as to include all the fruits the rank fruits

of modern scholarship. The fault is Byron's, of course, not the scholars'. The point of view is professionally detached, but the feminine in the author intrudes just enough to be interesting, and to allow the publisher to advertise the book as doing Byron "from the woman's point of view". But the woman is not that new celebrity, the Old Lady in Dubuque.

The second volume in the invigorating series of American "propaganda"