Books
Brégy, Katherine & Agar, William M. & Williams, Michael & Boyd-Carpenter & Kennedy, Leo & McGinnis, William F. & Chase, Mary Ellen & Morton, David & jr., Ernest Brennecke
BOOKS Knowledge and Faith The New Catholic Dictionary. New York: Universal Knowledge Foundation. Green cloth, $10.00; buckram, $12.50; half-leather, $15.00; cardinal red morocco, $25.00. IT SEEMS...
...Know Thyself The Mind at Mischief, by William S. Sadler...
...There is a frank recognition, too, that the kingly office is not at present enjoying a world-wide popularity- even though the author seeks to find in the position of King George V "the central link of his dominions" and to see in this monarch of our own day "the representative of the races that he rules...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...It is perhaps not a rash judgment to assert that, in considering the part played by the Catholic Church in the United States, no other single movement or achievement will exceed in importance the conception and execution of that epochal work of Catholic scholarship, the Catholic Encyclopedia...
...Of these thirty-six monarchs, eight met violent deaths before the age of fifty...
...2.00...
...We read, say, a sonnet, not knowing its authorship...
...Even the Bible has not escaped the current mania for recapitulation...
...The resultant suffrages apparently indicated that the average hack psychologist could "improve" Milton, Burns and Carl Sandburg with astonishing ease...
...And if there are moments when the narrative suggests the gracious naivete of some old chronicle, there are still finer moments when it recalls the august simplicity of the synoptic Gospels themselves...
...Coffin himself, in that rocky, windswept Eden...
...Powys has approached the issues of Judaism and Christianity from a view-point vaguely Hellenic...
...And for English-speaking readers the crystallization has been accomplished in this brief classic from the hand of the indefatigable Mr...
...Some of the most interesting sections deal with telepathy, automatic writing and spiritualism...
...Especially when he has, in duty bound, asked his students to "respond" to "standard" poetry, he has wondered whether their panic and indecision, or worse, their glib statements, were really genuine responses to the poetry itself, or only irrelevant, silly reflexes induced by the whole unnatural and perhaps silly situation...
...It is most satisfactory to know that more than twelve thousand copies of the New Dictionary were sold prior to publication...
...a road in Oxford and another in Maine, both streets sufficient for the quiet mind...
...THESE are days of popularization...
...A few years ago there was no great need for such a book, but now the need for it is to be seen everywhere, among young boys and girls in the high schools, among our colleges and universities, even among the average citizens of our country...
...Something of all this perhaps as much as the law allows or as much as would interest aliens at a distance-transpires in this volume prepared for American circulation...
...In his new book, Mr...
...But they are even more fundamental than distinctly Catholic doctrines...
...Only sanguine and idealistic publishers may perchance invest money in them...
...All of which is by way of insisting that such dilution and retailing of the world's best thought and writing is bound in the end to conduce to some emotional and intellectual maladjustment...
...As a piece of history, Hilaire Belloc gives us probably the most vivid and highly concentrated summary of the stormy years preceding and covering Joan's life yet put into words...
...The message of the book, alike for the individual handicapped by an abnormal psychologic state and for the normal mind, is as follows: Know yourself...
...Belloc...
...Now the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Encyclopedia witnesses the appearance of the New Catholic Dictionary, compiled and edited by the late Conde B. Pallen and Father Wynne, with the editorial assistance of Charles F. Wemyss Brown, Blanche M. Kelly and Andrew A. MacErlean, under the auspices of the surviving editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia...
...Entertaining experiments of this kind are readily performed...
...Perhaps that is why, since he can read this book with enjoyment and profit, he can so whole-heartedly recommend it to the average intelligent reader...
...The volume is indexed and well illustrated, though some of the portraits included are old friends possibly reproduced from previous histories...
...The person whose mental make-up lies within that field is already given to introspection and self-criticism...
...In many cases the manner of diagnosis is outlined and a cure or marked improvement is recorded...
...Self-knowledge and the will to conquer are within the grasp of all...
...When we ordinarily read "literature," do we make any really considerable attempt to discover what the author intended to communicate to us...
...THIS is a book for which all Christians ought to be very grateful...
...They show how wofully lacking in elementary information and equipment the better-than-average reader is, how bewildered he is, how pathetically timid, how dangerously he is addicted to "stock responses," to the feeling and saying only of what seems to be expected of him, how dependent upon "authority," how infected with a variety of absurd pretensions which border upon plain dishonesty...
...The intelligence which in former years wrote historical novels is now well pleased to conduct a single identity through the 300 pages of thumbed facts and small talk which constitute a popular biography...
...This feature makes the book as fascinating as many a detective or mystery yarn...
...Do we ever judge the composition on its merits alone...
...Llewelyn Powys, for example, has just rewritten the Testaments...
...Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand, by Anna De Koven...
...The seventeen essays are charmingly illustrated by the author in pen and ink sketches, and are printed and bound in such a way as to do great credit to their publisher...
...They might indeed have humbled even the not always infallible Mr...
...There is no pandering to weakness here, to phobias and hysterics...
...And Joseph to whom was espoused the Virgin Mary begot Jesus who was called the Messiah.' This is the ungarbled record of the ancient Syric manuscript recently discovered in the Monastery of Mount Sinai...
...In this way you will conquer yourself and in so doing gain as much of this world as it was meant for you to have...
...sacrificing innumerable tender and authentic details of that story, sacrificing the opportunity he would have reveled in to sift those theories, even sacrificing-as scarcely as any other biographer has been willing to do-his own subjective reaction to so thrilling a theme...
...Richards makes a determined attempt to discover some of the answers...
...He has incorporated into the actual record of events any number of legends and suppositions which make for misrepresentation...
...will recall a provocative sentence, at once perplexing and consoling, in his beautiful Conclusion to Studies in the Renaissance: "Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end," that is, the goal of living...
...Leo Kennedy...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company...
...The author has caught the spirit of the physicians of whom he writes, as when he says of Sydenham that he weighed in "a nice and scrupulous balance whether it be better to serve men or be praised by them...
...It might well have been included on Mr...
...Editors may send them streaking homeward in long envelopes...
...The picture of literary Ireland of the nineties and the early years of this century, with the solemn face of the "somnambulistic" Yeats, and the bearded and benign A. E. and the maternal and four-square Lady Gregory, would be incomplete if it omitted the smiling countenance of this satanic wit...
...The part played by the Catholic Church in the United States will, of course, be a very prominent feature of the whole chapter of universal Catholic Action...
...Michael Williams...
...It is clearly and most readably printed on good paper, profusely illustrated with engravings, maps and half-tone plates...
...For the story is told as an epic, almost without visible emotion save where some burning adjective sears with white-hot love or loathing...
...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...
...The normal mind will also profit by this remarkably sane and clear presentation of the almost unlimited deceptions that the mind can work upon its possessor...
...Charles G. Herbermann, Bishop Shahan, Father Wynne, Monsignor Pace, Conde B. Pallen and their collaborators in that monumental achievement, must take a high place among the most rigorously selected group of modern Catholic leaders that might be compiled...
...He has completed his work in a careful biblical English, and annotated the text with his own commentaries and moral conclusions...
...Make the best of them...
...The compression without distortion or harmful minimizing of the enormous amount of information dealing with practically every subject in religion, Scripture, tradition, doctrine, morals, the sacraments, rites, customs, devotions and symbolism of the Church, and also the facts concerning the Church in every country under the sun, is an extraordinary achievement...
...and it is the misfortune of readers at a distance that more tender skins and more stringent libel laws, in these days, confine the circulation of many fine satires on well-known figures to the subterranean channels of unpublished circulation...
...six witnessed the ravages and miseries of civil war within their kingdom...
...Discover what you can do, and do that to the best of your ability...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...Such situations raise rather important questions in both aesthetics and pedagogy...
...They reveal a shocking inability, on the part of the readers, to make out the plain meanings of statements, to construe simple English sentences...
...But the idea has been tried with every succeeding generation, and little has come of it...
...Despite its rather forbidding scientific and tabular aspect, it makes highly amusing and instructive reading...
...It is the storehouse of past events and ideas and the interassociations of these that originate within the mind itself...
...The present edition uses a rather small type in order to compress the work into two sizable volumes, but is admirable in every other respect...
...Whimsical, humorous, mellow, delicate, they minister in their own sure and beneficent manner to such readers as are like-minded with their author...
...Further, this volume informs us that of the twenty-nine kings who married, eight may be said to have been happy with their wives, while six were known to be unhappy with their children-this latter condition being singularly noticeable entirely throughout the Plantaganet dynasty...
...Many of Mr...
...Nevertheless his book continues to be read, it merits attention, it enforces respect...
...IT SEEMS almost certain that future historians dealing with the tremendous epoch preceding, during and following the world war, will find few subjects more important than the tremendous revival of the world-wide influence of the Catholic Church...
...The careful reading of this book of Father Ross's will satisfy many a perplexed mind, will actually convince that the ablest exponents of physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, astronomy, are by men without faith, without religion...
...4.00...
...The author recognizes the importance of those two, but gives ample evidence that the broader classification is sound...
...They should certainly serve to make our own reading a trifle more careful and sensitive, and should, above all, induce in us the excellent virtue of humility...
...LOVERS of Pater (and they are too rare...
...IT WOULD have been a thousand pities if all the enthusias- tic remembrance of Joan of Arc conjured by this quincentenary year of her victories should have failed to crystallize into some permanent tribute...
...and in all probability he was the legitimate son of a humble artizan whose name was Joseph...
...De Koven has written a fluent commentary around the letters which passed between the two, thus affording new glimpses of Walpole's elusive character and resurrecting the fastidious literary sociability of Paris under Louis XV...
...and still there are those of us who have yet to be persuaded that chimney corners are not among the best of vantage-grounds for looking forth upon the world...
...and, best of all, an analysis of the coast-of-Maine temperament in all its manifold and paradoxical traits, an analysis singularly convincing to a reviewer who was born and bred, as was Mr...
...Underlying much of the practical agnosticism of today, of the unwillingness to consider the claims of the Church, is an uncertainty or disbelief concerning the existence of a personal God, a doubt about the survival of the soul after death-and this attitude rests forsooth on "science...
...nor do the subjects mentioned nearly exhaust the topics authoritatively dealt with...
...New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company...
...The instinct and the emotions are classified under five main headings: 1. The life urge-the self-preservation group...
...March vacationing in a baker's wagon...
...Saint-Pol drenched in sunlight...
...Fears, pains, ideas, are all projected from the wide domain of the subconscious into the spotlight of consciousness, and appear as real...
...Richards a little...
...How large a part is played by our irrelevant prejudices and preconceptions...
...Shaw in the preface to Saint Joan-we are given in admirable summary the life and death of the immortal Maid of France...
...Because of the lucid, attractive, almost personal style in which truths the most fundamental and important are presented in this volume, I know of no book that I should prefer to place in the hands of educated readers...
...Coffin's title-page, for it admirably suggests the distinctive atmosphere of his most satisfying book...
...3. The worship urge- the religious group...
...Can he ever get just a square deal-nothing less and nothing more...
...These articles relate, briefly yet sufficiently, what the Church has done for civilization, and incidentally correct many errors which have hitherto passed for true history...
...The honest reader of Mr...
...The physical appearance and quality of the volume are most admirable...
...5. The social urge-the herd group...
...4. The power urge-the egotistic group...
...This is the price of poetry from the amphibian-and it is paid, ungrudgingly, by readers who may possess themselves, at this price or any other, of so fine a poem as the vigorous and imaginative The Crab Tree, or so translucent and unforgettable a lyric as Fresh Fields...
...The New Catholic Dictionary brings within the compass of a single volume practically all the information that the average intelligent Catholic or non-Catholic would require, and at the same time directs the attention of more thorough students to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the great quarry from which the dictionary has been hewed, and the other authoritative and scientific works from which the Encyclopedia itself derives so much of its material...
...The Catholic point of view concerning sects and false religions is explained in addition to the exposition of the Catholic faith itself...
...These are the truths presented and demonstrated in the present book: the reasonableness of faith in spite of reason's inability to understand the mysteries involved...
...His attributes...
...Without all of which, how flat, stale and unprofitable the human mind...
...the veritable existence of God the eternal Creator...
...Never in the past have the truths, the theories and the guesses of men of science been brought to the attention of the average individual as in the present hour...
...The book might well be used in schools and colleges as additional reading on account of its interpretative values of the characters and policies of English monarchs...
...In a time like the present, when the vulgarization and quantity-production even of literature dealing with the sacred subject of religion is one of the most demoralizing of social influences, the appearance of this new work is of primary importance...
...4.00...
...And of the shrewd and worldly Sloane who achieved fame, fortune and social position, he says, "His consulting rooms were crowded, till ten every evening, with the poor whom he saw for nothing...
...One encounters him, for example, in George Moore's Hail and Farewell, as one of that company distinguished by the names of A. E. and Yeats and Lady Gregory, and again- under another name, of course-in Joyce's Ulysses...
...HISTORICAL research has unearthed many facts about the origin and progress of the French Revolution which Carlyle did not know...
...He submitted thirteen quite different poems, anonymously, to groups of university students specializing in literature, instructed them to attack each poem several times, as vigorously and as honestly as possible, and to write out a considered, matured response...
...Such subjects as these will never, perhaps, cheat chimney corners of their occupants...
...The totality of our past life, so little of which even the most perfect memory can focus within the vision of consciousness, but which can arise and overwhelm the weak or the unwary until the real and the unreal become unex-tricably tangled...
...There is enough to give an intimation of the character and quality of mind behind the book...
...Powys's textual garnishments are non-biblical quotations of, I trust, comparative authenticity...
...Had he expressed his own attitudes with less cockiness, with less arrogance and smirking smartness, with a less scornful and presumptuous air of superiority, he might have communicated his own message somewhat more effectively...
...3.00...
...WHEN the master of Strawberry Hill went to Paris, he found an extraordinary friend in Madame du Deffand, whose salon had been one of the genuinely distinguished coins de Paris...
...and a childlike credence for anything which contradicts the biblical record, and you have the essence of The Cradle of God...
...Boyd-Carpenter...
...FOR a period of 835 years, Great Britain was ruled by five dynasties, the Norman, the Plantaganet, the Tudor, the Stuart and finally the Hanoverian, which closed with the death of Queen Victoria on January 22, 1901...
...It is here, and in dealing with hysterics and paranoiacs, that the deceptions practised by the subconscious are the most extraordinary...
...He is a scientist and uses the methods of science, but spiritual forces are an ever-present reality to him...
...The Dictionary, based upon the Encyclopedia yet essentially a work of a very different type, and designed to enter fields where the Encyclopedia would be too unwieldy an instrument, will enable unnumbered thousands of readers and writers who are not called upon to make a scientific and complete study of the Catholic religion, to be supplied with authentic knowledge on all the ordinary and useful facts connected with the Church and the part played by the Church in modern civilization...
...Its passages on the necessary distinction between emotional and intellectual belief, its ardent propaganda for more energetic critical and appreciative efforts, its defense of logical analysis, and its concrete, illuminating, independent conclusions will win it a well-deserved place among the few really indispensable volumes on the book-shelf of the educator and the poetry lover...
...For instance, he writes: "There can be no doubt that in actual fact Jesus Christ was born, not in a manger in Bethlehem, but in a little house in the hillside village of Nazareth...
...The defense of the Faith when attacked or misunderstood, and its extension through the spreading of correct information, has for a long time been handicapped by the lack of really trustworthy books of general information...
...Belloc could scarcely have achieved it had he not kept resolutely to the main objective story...
...And the results will be of undoubted value for the sciences of criticism and of teaching in general...
...man, his nature and his immortality...
...Self-deception can go to such extremes that the medium whose whole psychic being is concentrated upon a single idea sees the disembodied spirit before the mind'e eye and can lead the more susceptible into the same psychologic error...
...What a wholesome lesson for the modern psychologist could he but learn it...
...Just what is the nature, and the extent, of the barriers that separate us from the artist...
...Life with a Capital The Cradle of God, by Llewelyn Powys...
...Suspicions of this kind received disturbing confirmation a few years ago, when the Columbia University Research Bureau printed a series of deliberately mangled passages of poetry, together with the originals, and required many persons, some of them specialists in criticism, to choose the versions that seemed "best" to them...
...Yet such recapitulation may be permissible if done with competence and skill...
...Even Mr...
...This rambles a little...
...It is largely the record of a very comprehensive series of tests...
...Briefer Mention The Harley Street Calendar, by H. H. Bashford...
...These "truths to live by" are not a symposium of all the doctrines that make up the spiritual and intellectual life of a Catholic-they do not embrace our belief in the Incarnation with its consequences, the Church, the sacraments, the Mass...
...It is in this role-and as raconteur-that Gogarty is happiest...
...For the benefit of the overdriven, it has more than once been summarized and presented in the inevitable tabloid...
...It is less ambitious, perhaps, than some of his other works, but it is not, like them, disfigured by his attempts to put forward a very debatable and flimsy "psychological theory of value...
...These responses he has classified scientifically, to see what they reveal...
...David Morton...
...CERTAIN awkward suspicions have occasionally afflicted every thoughtful person who has attempted to teach the appreciation of literature in schools or colleges...
...Powys is convinced of the excellence and durability of Life with a capital...
...Such condensation, where facts are so crowded and theories at times so controversial, is of course not less than a tour de force...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith...
...To base a conviction on the evidence of one unproven manuscript, however ancient, is to fall into an error generally attributed to the orthodox...
...William M. Agar...
...Devonshire, the delectable, from the marshes of Sedgemoor to Clovelly...
...But if this racial and traditional quality is present, it is sharply modified by the peculiar and individual accent of a mind to which wit is native and scholarship a delight and science a practice (for he is a surgeon...
...Their substance is, perhaps, slight enough to those seeking only the dramatic, the pertinent, the controversial: a captain of the Maine coast, who "was after money and found poetry...
...After Domremy Joan of Arc, by Hilaire Belloc...
...So far he is racial and traditional, and the face that looks out of the poems is the Irish face of ingenuous wonder and delight, or poetic sadness and dream-all touched, characteristically, with the mild and unobtrusive mysticism of a race historically troubled by an awareness of another world beyond this...
...3.00...
...For such recalcitrant minds as ours Mr...
...Anything like a detailed review of this book would necessarily take up space which would almost rival the more than thousand pages of the volume itself...
...Seventeen Essays An Attic Room, by Robert P. Tristram Coffin...
...Wit in Stanzas Wild Apples, by Oliver Gogarty...
...It deals with the field just past the borderland of normal psychology...
...The author has spent much of his life among the students and professors of Columbia University, and is well acquainted with the truths, views and opinions emanating from writers and scientists...
...THIS slender volume of verse is the first book to be published in America from the pen of a man who has been a lively and active figure in the literary life of Dublin for twenty-five years...
...Unfortunately he presents no evidence that he himself profited in this direction by his researches...
...Then we are told it is one of Shakespeare's, and again we read it-but how differently...
...This classification is opposed to Freud's emphasis upon the sex instinct and Adler's insistence upon the ego group...
...That these are not the "spirits" of the medium the following quotation shows: "I do not doubt the existence of spiritual forces, but I believe that they are engaged in operating in the spiritual realm, and that their time is not occupied with trivial intrusion into the materialistic realm-intrusion, apparently, with no more serious mission than the performance of marvels for the mystification of mortal minds...
...Add to this iration a dash of the current "humanism...
...The names of Dr...
...And few readers, either old or young, being so initiated, will fail to probe further into one of the most inspiring an heart-subduing of all human records...
...The subconcious is first described...
...The birth of this child was unheralded...
...Typographically it is one of the charming trade editions of the season...
...This book is intended for the sophisticated reader who cares for social history...
...The actual number of mon-archs was thirty-six, of whom five were queens...
...Gogarty's vivid and compelling personality and his sharp wit have won him something like a legendary character in literary and political circles in Ireland since the first feverish days of the Revival-so that his laughing figure walks in and out of the pages of various chronicles of that time...
...1 HIS is a fascinating book...
...Unless there is unquestioned and firm belief in these truths, it is useless to talk about such things as the Divinity of Christ, His Real Presence in the Mass and the Holy Eucharist, the infallibility of the Pope, etc...
...He will gain much by learning the truth about himself and will perhaps be heartened by discovering that the very weaknesses he fears are shared by many and can be overcome...
...New York: liar-court, Brace and Company...
...Dynasty in Perspective The Kings of England, by Clive Bigham...
...The results are almost terrifying...
...And what if we are now told that it was composed by Ella Wheeler Wilcox...
...Its fervor is all by implication, although its faith in Joan and her election by the High King of heaven is explicit enough...
...You have certain capabilities and certain limitations...
...2. The sex urge-the reproduction group...
...Being a genial pagan, with a genial pagan's tolerance for what he considers to be a nonomania which originated in the head of the patriarch Abra-a, Mr...
...Ernest Brennecke, jr...
...2.00...
...The purpose of this notice is entirely a practical one, namely, to urge upon the readers of The Commonweal, clergy and laity together, the fact that this book is practically indispensable for every home library, and that no better single volume could be chosen by Catholic groups to place in libraries, newspaper offices and other fountains of public opinion throughout the country...
...But one agrees that, after all the defects of Carlyle have been added up, The French Revolution is a "great and enduring work...
...1.75...
...As a piece of biography, he gives us with a stark beauty worthy of his theme a masterful introduction to the story of Joan of Arc...
...That sale should be multiplied many times over in the near future if American Catholics realize, as they should, the merit of the instrument now placed in their hands for the service of the Church and civilization...
...6.00...
...But Mr...
...There are portraits, also, done with a fine precision and concentration and a quality of penetrative imagination which they share with the work as a whole...
...The war itself, and the economic, political, racial and religious factors which brought about that catastrophe, and caused other major manifestations of human energy, such as the Russian Revolution and the International Peace Movement, appear to have sensational and what might be termed original features which undoubtedly must attract ordinary attention more profoundly than the revival of Catholicism...
...Yet such a view would be superficial for undoubtedly, when justly considered, the enormous expansion of so old and so familiar a thing as the Catholic Church is essentially a more arresting phenomenon than almost any other movement of the human spirit or the human mind...
...Literature with the Irish has always been a more definitely personal record than with others-more frankly and peculiarly autobiographical, and more given to the naming of names...
...No modern writer dealing with the Catholic Church in English-speaking countries can dispense with the Encyclopedia...
...Nevertheless, one refuses to believe that the mental equipment necessary for their enjoyment is no longer among us...
...One thinks of Gogarty and his published and unpublished poems as directly in the descent of the old satiric bards who named their targets and marked them for a personal immortality that has been a chuckle down the centuries...
...One hopes, in passing, that Father Ross may be tempted to elucidate the latter in a future volume, to form a sequel to this one...
...a dogged dis- in any but scientific explanations of abnorml phenomena...
...New York: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Of these dynasties the Plantaganet lasted over three hundred years or approximately 39 percent of the period...
...The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle...
...If he believes the way to the earthly paradise to be over the articulate dust of Isaiah and the proud moldered bones of Paul, rather than through them, it is his affair...
...Katherine Breg Science and Religion Truths to Live By, by J. Elliot Ross...
...The main part of the book discusses the great variety of abnormal states, worries, fears, inferiority complexes, etc., and illustrates them by examples drawn from the wealth of the author's experience...
...In 125 pages-scarcely double the number consumed by Mr...
...for to embrace that assumption means to deny the saving graces of humor, of an avidity for ideas, of a love of the purely whimsical, of a delight in words and phrases for their own sake...
...It is, moreover, a practical pageant of history, with many brief articles dealing with historical events and personages, in the Old Testament times and the times of the new dispensation, and with Popes, bishops, priests, men and women of intellectual and moral distinction...
...You are living in a real world and can gain nothing by conscious or subconscious evasion, by self-excuse or self-deception...
...More than two hundred writers, thirty-six of them members of the regular editorial staff of the Catholic Encyclopedia, labored under the direction of the chief editors in the making of the New Dictionary...
...How Not to Read Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, by I. A. Richards...
...Coffin's book is a delight, to read and reread with ever-increasing pleasure...
...There has been a flood of superficial literature, written with good and worthy intentions no doubt, but sadly lacking in the necessary elements of scholarship and clearly presented erudition...
...Even so, Practical Criticism is his best book so far...
...Aunt Emma, who "taught one that out of the vigor of repression comes strength to take one to war or to the still sterner issues of life...
...Though she was then old and blind, her mind and her emotions were so energetic that the more cautious Englishman was not infrequently taken aback...
...a lyrical hymn in praise of fish in clear water and a veritable panegyric on fish in chowder...
...But-wisely, in the circumstances, and perhaps more fortunately for enduring interest-the poems here have come out of that other genius which everyone feels in contact with Gogarty or his work: the ingenuous and wise and youthful spirit of authentic lyricism...
...Booksellers may claim there is small demand for personal and aesthetic essays...
...The author is too cognizant of the depths of the mind to regard man as purely material...
...Bigham has presented the various reigns in a pithy and picturesque manner, making the reading much more interesting than the nineteenth-century regal histories...
...Similarly, the book market is flooded each season with condensations of authoritative work on the sciences, and summaries of philosophic thought...
...Nothing in the way of corrective annotation is added, the only editorial material being a spirited introduction by Mr...
...seven were actually driven from the throne and deposed, while of the total number of monarchs presented to us, no less than ten were usurpers...
...William F. McGinnis...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated...
...The ease of the author's style and the book's freedom from technical terms commend it to the layman no less than to the physician...
...6.00...
...He has done excellent service in showing that no truths of science are at variance with the eternal verities of revealed religion...
...of the monarchs only two lived to be over eighty years of age, and only four reigned more than fifty years...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Admittedly much of this is fraud perpetrated upon a willing public, but the author has examined many sincere mediums-self-deceived to be sure, but honest...
...Its sketches of England, of France and of the Maine coast arise from experiences and sensations obviously cultivated and enjoyed for their own sakes, not for their "fruits...
...It is made up of biographical sketches of eleven great British medical men, beginning with Gilbert "the Englishman" (born in the twelfth century) and embracing such famous names as Harvey, Hans Sloane, Jenner, Lister and the Canadian-born Osier who died just a decade ago...
...A special feature of great and hopeful significance is the fact that among the more than two hundred collaborators there are so many lay scholars, thirty of them being women...
...Not all the poems are entirely successful, and when some of them fail, it is because the lyric poet is momentarily banished by the wit or the scholar or the scientist...
...THE reviewer makes no claim to a special knowledge of psychology...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Here, too, he is in the tradition of his country's poetry-with its fresh exuberance, its delight in the shapes and colors of the natural world, an amazed and youthful interest in the perennial recurrence of life and its repititious phenomena...
...How much of what we think we find in it was unconsciously put there by ourselves...
...Richards's exciting book is invited to participate in the experiment, inasmuch as the authorship of the poems is divulged only in a folded appendix which he is urged not to consult until he has read the "responses" and added his own to the collection...
...Hilaire Belloc...
...Surely An Attic Room, and the interest it must generate among the best readers of the country, will refute any such monstrously conceived notion that essays are no longer in demand...
...There is noticeably little indication throughout the volume of a wish to force scholarly predilections or pet theories upon the reader...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 11
