Life — August 16, 1906 — page 16: what you’re looking at

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return had already been sown to as many crops of romance as the ground would bear while Mr. Savage was tilling other fields. Mr. Arthur C. Benson, the biographer of Edwant Fitzgerald and Walter Pater for the English Mea Letters series and Fellow of Magdalen College, Cam ILLIAM ALLEN WHITE'S word sketches, published under the title bridge, has published, under the title of From a of In‘Our Torn, form one of the thoroughly satisfactory squares in that patchwork picture of transitional America which is being built up by the better short-story writers of our generation. They deal with persons and events in a Kansas town in the last quarter of the last century, and while they are eminently entertaining, they also possess a quality rarer and harder to define. How much of reminiscence and how much of imagination have en tered into their composition only the author, and perhaps hardly he, can say, but the amalgam is perfect, and they awaken in us a sentiment that almost savors of association and an understanding that is almost too personal to seem purely objective. One can almost say that he makes us remember things we never saw College Windew,.a volume of essays which, besides the charm of their literary grace, have the irresistible interest that inheres in any self-revelation made with unassuming candor and untouched by any trace of pose of taint of egotism. Mr. Benson, like many a less-gifted observer of life, is recurrently conscious of the desire to know what others really make of it all, and, being himself inarticulate, he has put down in these eighteen papers what he makes, or fails to make of some of its big and little riddles. The volume offers the opportunity of intimate intercourse with the A Lady in Waiting, by Charles Woodcock Savage, is the first. mind of another, a privilege which is always rare povel byan American gentleman whose own career has been and in this case delightful. more romantic, more adventurous and certainly more original ; . ; than that of his heroine, Julie de Chesnil, keeper of a diary The eight essays by George W. Alger included in ‘and sometime lady-in-waiting to her Maj. feral Overstrain are bull-down on the opposite ety Marie Antoinette. Me. Savage's story otizon from the work we have just been considering is written in romantic vein and with aflow. They embody the opinions of an honest and fair ing pen,and its chief fault is rather its mis- ™inded man upon some of the disharmonics between fortune, namely. the fact that the passing of Of acquired commercial and political ethics and our the old régime. the gauntlet of the Reign itberited mechanism of legal control, dealing with of Terror, the American exile and the happy Such subjects as “Unpunished Commercial Crime,” * Generosity and Corruption,” “Sensational Journal. ism and the Law,""but, on the whole, merely reiterat- ing the obvious conclusions of unbiased observers rather than giving form to any feelings held in sus- pension in the popular consciousness but heretofore uncrystallized. ‘The habits and habitat of the buccancers have tinged the dreams of so many would-be pirates and inspired the pens of so many Cyrus Townsend Bradys that one is unprepared to find between the covers of John Maseficld’s On the Spanish Main not a new dressing of old puppets, but a historical study of great interest and unusual quality. The work, which LAST SCAMMER HE LOOKED SOMETHING LIKE THES To HER , is drawn directly from the old chronicles, enables us y to win back directly to the time, the places and the men themselves, and brings before us not only their ships, their armaments and their exploits, but their spirit and their point of view. i The Count at Harvard, by Rupert Sargent Holland, No Hurry J i an account, as its title-page informs us, of the adven. HE minister was vf tures of a young gentleman of fashion at Harvanl shocked swhen:the F University, has every appearance of being a novel. : As a matter of fact, however, its chapters have no young lady declined : connection with cach other, but form a series of indi an introduction to 2 4 vidually amusing sketches, cleverly inconsequent. some of his parishion- (a) expressing to laughable perfection the uneducational ers. “Why, my dear ES possibilities of the academic atmosphere, but limited young lady, did you i)! in their appeal by the very indirection which gives ever think that per- them point. haps you will have to J. B. Kerjoot mingle with these In Our Town, by William Allen White. (McClure good people when you | *\', Phillips and Company. $1.50.) Getto heaven?” A Lady in Waiting, by Charles Woodcock Savage “Well,” she e¢ (D. Appleton and Company. $1.50.) claimed, “that will From-a College Window, by Arthur C. Benson. be soon enough.” (G. P. Putnam's Sons.) Moral Overstrain, by George W.Alger. (Houghton, Mifflin and Company. $1.00.) On the Spantsh Main, by John Masefield. (The Macmillan Company. $3.50.) The Count at Harvard, by Rupeet Sargent Holland RUT THES SUMMER HE LOOKS MoE LIKE THES (L. C. Page and Company, Boston. 81.50.) URIOSITY, love and hunger have made the world what it is comicbooks.com