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108 about "the strange welter of sex " is better than Max's Wells, and the combination of Edgar Lee Masters and Gray's Elegy produced the matchless line: "the lewd forefathers of the village sleep"). Mr. Squire edited The New Statesman in the absence of Mr. Clifford Sharp; he has just founded The London Mercury, a monthly review; he writes in Land and Water a page of literary criticism similar to that in The New Statesman which was the source of this book; and, during the war, he wrote satires, the gayest and the bitterest, and incomparably the best satiric verse which that singularly uninspiring calamity brought forth. The little pamphlet The Survival of the Fittest may presently be forgotten; such things have happened. But I should rather have written it than the imperishable works of all our Vigilantes put together. Finally, the same writer who testifies to Mr. Squire's influence informs me that he is about thirty-six years old and is what we should call a college man; and I may add, in the interest of thoroughness, that I have seen a portrait of Mr. Squire and judge that he is not displeasing to the sight.

This is a fairly large circle to draw around so small a center as Books in General, but a few points in the circumference are like little lamps throwing their light on Solomon Eagle. For the sum of all this activity is that Mr. Squire is forever a critic; his parodies, his satires, his editorial work, are critical. He seems to be doing many things, but, except for his poetry, he is always doing one thing, and doing that thing very well.

There is no temptation to discuss adventures of souls among masterpieces or the canons of criticism, in setting down the qualities of Solomon Eagle. He does give us the adventures of a curious and curiously stocked mind among trivialities such as music hall lyrics, political songs, Who's Who, typographical errors, and Archibald Henderson. He adds sly foot-notes on Thomas Love Peacock, because he is not ready to write at length about him, and on Henry James and James Joyce, possibly because he is paid to write precisely one page each week, possibly because he is writing elsewhere a reasoned history of contemporary English letters; I do not know. I do know that the general effect of this book is one of irritation at so much triviality, and the effect is heightened by the number of good things in the book. In some two hundred and fifty pages there is not a line of slipshod writing nor is there a stupid judge-