When the literary Roll of Honour of all the belligerents comes to be considered quietly, in the steady light of Peace, not many names will stand higher in any country than that of our English writer, HECTOR HUGH MUNRO, whose subtle and witty satires, stories and fantasies were put forth under the pseudonym “SAKI.”  I have but to name The Chronicles of Clovis for discriminating readers to know what their loss was when MUNRO (who, although over age, had enlisted as a private and refused a commission) fell fighting in the Beaumont-Hamel action in November 1916.  Mr. JOHN LANE has brought out, under the title The Toys of Peace, a last collection of “SAKI’S” fugitive works, with a sympathetic but all too brief memoir by Mr. ROTHAY REYNOLDS.  Although “SAKI” is only occasionally at his very best in this volume—­on the grim side, in “The Interlopers,” and in his more familiar irresponsible and high-spirited way in “A Bread-and-Butter Miss” and “The Seven Cream Jugs;” although there may be no masterpiece of fun or raillery to put beside, say, “Esme;” there is in every story a phrase or fancy marked by his own inimitable felicity, audacity or humour.  It is good news that a complete uniform edition of his books is in preparation.

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I can’t help feeling that ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY’S chief aim in Up the Hill and Over (HURST AND BLAOKETT) was to write a convincing tract for the times on a subject which is achieving unhappy prominence in America as in our own police-courts.  A worthy aim, I doubt not.  One of the chief characters is a drug-taker; and as if that were not enough another is “out of her head,” while a third, Dr. Callandar, the Montreal specialist, is in the throes of a nervous breakdown.  This seems to me to be distinctly overdoing it.  It is the doctor’s love-story (a story so complicated that I cannot attempt a precis) which is the designedly central but actually subordinate theme.  I have the absurd idea that this might really have begun life as a pathological thesis and suffered conversion into a novel.  The author has no conscience in the matter of the employment of the much-abused device of coincidence.  And I don’t think the story would cure anyone of drug-taking.  On the contrary.

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The Three Black Pennys (HEINEMANN) is a story that began by perplexing and ended by making a complete conquest of me.  Its author, Mr. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, is, I think, new to this side of the Atlantic; the publishers tell me (and, to prevent any natural misapprehension, I pass on the information at once) that he belongs to “a Pennsylvania Dutch family, settled for many generations in Philadelphia.”  Which being so, one can enjoy his work with a free conscience.  It certainly seems to me very unusual in quality.  The theme of the tale is the history of the Penny family, or rather of the periodical outcrop in it