["St. Augustine"] stands out above its predecessors both in beauty of style and significance of thought. A popular biography only in being easy and delightful to read, Miss West's flexible and trenchant style here wholly at her command, mingling wit and eloquence without disharmony, her book is also a keen analysis of the character and meaning of one of the world's greatest men. Here with a subject worthy of her steel, Miss West has risen above her lesser self, somewhat too generous of casual impressions, and has given us a volume rich in reflection as well as daringly alive in treatment. Augustine stands before us almost a contemporary, a tortured spirit, fellow with Tolstoy, Lawrence, Proust, and Joyce, yet at the same time a citizen of the dying Roman Empire when under the strokes of Goth and Vandal and the weight of its own decrepitude an age-old civilization...