book we have the author in his very worst form.  “Three of Them” is a study of children, and the only excuse I can find for it is that it must be intended as a sop to the sentimentalists.  Of the others my first vote goes to “The Surgeon of Gaster Fell,” and my second to “The Prisoner’s’ Defence;” but if you are susceptible to Sir ARTHUR’S sense of fun I can also recommend “The Fall of Lord Barrymore” and “One Crowded Hour.”  Not a great collection, but just good enough.

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Mr. ROMER WILSON has devoted the nearly three hundred pages of his Martin Schuler (METHUEN) to describing what it feels like to be a genius, and, speaking from a very limited knowledge of this class, I should say that he had mapped the mind of a genius of a certain sort very well.  His estimate of the creative artist’s anguish of emptiness rings true, and will, perhaps surprise the people who think that his lot, like a policeman’s, is a very happy one.  His Martin, who struck me as a very unpleasant young man, was a composer who meant to achieve immortality, but turned down the broad way of musical comedy and acquired money instead.  Just in time he repented and wrote a grand opera, and then Mr. WILSON cut short his career in a fashion that seemed to me regrettably hackneyed, which was the only reason why I shared the other characters’ sorrow.  Why so many people, all rather nasty people too, came to devote themselves to Martin I could not discover, although I had the publisher’s word for it that he was “attractive”; but perhaps his genius accounted for it.  Probably it is my duty to declare here that Martin and his friends were almost all made in Germany before the War, but as they are exceptionally disagreeable and quite unlikely to inspire anyone with an unjust tenderness for their nation I have no hesitation in recommending the book as a clever study of temperament and a just picture of a part of the German musical world as it was when one last knew anything about it.

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It is all a matter of taste, of course, but personally I don’t envy Mr. J.G.  LEGGE his self-imposed task of convicting the Hun out of his own mouth of—­well, of being a Hun.  Germans they were and Germans they remain, and the author goes to great lengths, even to the length of 572 pages, to show that their peculiar qualities date back at least as far as 1813.  His Rhyme and Revolution in Germany (CONSTABLE) is not so much a history of the scrambling undignified revolutionary movements culminating in the year 1848, as a collection of contemporary comment thereon, in prose and verse.  The prose is generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author’s connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly.  The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany