Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/210

182 a laconic and suggestive fashion. Mr. Davidson has a good right to maledict "Elkin Mathews & John Lane" for having revived the detestable old custom of printing catchwords at the lower corner of the page. The reader has just received the full impression of the London scene, when he is disturbed by the isolated word, which destroys the impression and puzzles him. London streets are not, surely, very favourable to foxes! He then turns the page and finds that the word is the first in the rural poem which follows. How Tennyson would have growled if the printer had put the name of some intrusive beast at the foot of one of his poems! Even in prose the custom is still intolerable; it makes one read the word twice over as thus (pp. 159, 60), "Why doesn't the wretched publisher publisher bring it out!"

We find some further poetry in Mr. Richard Garnett's translations from Luigi Tansillo. Not having access just now to the original Italian, I cannot answer for their fidelity, but they are worth reading, even in English, and soundly versified.

It is high time to speak of the prose. The essays are "A Defence of Cosmetics," by Mr. Max Beerbohm, and "Reticence in Literature," by Mr. Arthur Waugh. I notice that a critic in the New York Nation says that the Whistlerian affectations of Mr. Beerbohm are particularly intolerable. I understood his essay to be merely a jeu d'esprit, and found that it amused me, though the tastes and opinions ingeniously expressed in it are precisely the opposite of my own. Mr. Beerbohm is (or pretends to be) entirely on the side of artifice against nature. The difficulty is to determine what is nature. The easiest and most "natural" manners of a perfect English lady are the result of art, and of a more advanced art than that indicated by more ceremonious manners. Mr. Beerbohm says that women in the time of Dickens appear to have been utterly natural in their conduct, "flighty, gushing, blushing, fainting,