The Graftons (COLLINS) is a sequel to Mr. ARCHIBALD MARSHALL’S former chronicle of the same pleasant family.  Herein you shall find them, pursuing the even tenor of their prosperous way, father, son and charming daughters, and arriving placidly at the point where, in the natural sequence of events, these daughters leave the paternal nest for others provided by eligible mates.  Their courtships, and some mild uncertainty as to whether papa Grafton, well-preserved and wealthy widower, will or will not follow the example of his female offspring, provide the entire matter of the book.  For the rest Mr. MARSHALL is content to mark time (and very pleasantly) with pictures of English country life at its most comfortable, and in particular with some comedy scenes, excellently done, turning upon the often delicate relationship of Hall and Parsonage.  There are a couple of clerical portraits in the book that seem to me as lifelike as anything of the kind since Barchester.  Apart from this the outstanding virtue of the Graftons is the reality of their dialogue.  Precisely thus do, or did, actual people speak in the quiet old times before the War; precisely thus also did nothing whatever of any consequence happen to the vast majority of them.  Since, however, the truth and charm of the tale depend upon this absence of the sensational, I must the more regret that Messrs. COLLINS, who have printed it exquisitely, should have been betrayed into a coloured wrapper of almost grotesque ineptitude.

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In Graduation (CHATTO AND WINDUS) there is an essential femininity about Miss IRENE RUTHERFORD McLEOD’S style and general attitude that imposes limitations; it is a quality that shows itself not only in her plot, but in her characters, the three reputed males who figure therein being as fine examples of true womanliness as you need wish to meet. Frieda was the heroine (a name somehow significant); and of the trouser-wearers, the first, Geoffrey, was a cat-like deceiver, who fascinated poor Frieda for ends unspecified, pretended (the minx!) to be keen on the Suffrage movement, which he wasn’t, and concealed a wife; the second was a Being too perfect to endure beyond Chapter 10, where he expires eloquently of heart-failure, leaving Alan, the third, to bear the white man’s burden and clasp Frieda to his maidenly heart.  This sentimental progress is, I suppose, what is implied by the title and the symbolic staircase (if it is a staircase?) on the wrapper.  But my trouble was that I could never discern in the sweet girl-graduate any development of character from the pretentious futility of her earliest appearance.  Perhaps I am prejudiced.  Undeniably Miss McLEOD can draw a certain type of prig with a horrible facility.  But the antiquated modernity of her scheme, flooded as it is with the New Dawn of, say, a decade ago, and its bland disregard of everything that has happened since, ended by violently irritating me.  Others may have better luck.