whole country from Finland to the Crimea (the only two parts, by the way, which he has made me thirst to visit), and has gone with his eyes open.  In the present volume, touching only incidentally on his journeyings and still less on politics, he has tried to satisfy the thousand-and-one questioners who, one imagines, have been plaguing him not a little lately as to those intimate details that really count in the life of a nation.  He tells us for instance how the Russians do business and keep out the cold; how many of the women you could call pretty, and how much mutton a Kirghiz can eat.  Though some of this is not new, yet the book has, as a whole, a most vivid freshness, and, if in the end the main effect is to make one content to live out of Russia, that is a tribute to the writer’s frankness.  At the least one is able to rejoice in his final verdict of unqualified enthusiasm for his hosts, since he found not merely acquaintances ready to welcome the popular English, but true and trustworthy friends in all classes of the community.

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MRS. OLIVER ONIONS has a light puckish humour and a smooth if over-hasty pen, and I don’t think she quite does her own intelligence (or ours) full justice in The Bridge of Kisses (HUTCHINSON).  I liked her flapper heroine, Joey, and the naughty nephews, the O.U.2’s, and her sapper lover, The Bridge Builder, who was a confoundedly long time over his work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings.  But Joey’s pipsqueak shirker fiance, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki.  The fact is that “BERTHA RUCK” can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of characterisation; and it is distinctly disappointing to see her content with the curate’s egg standard.

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It is time that some of our novelists put up a statue to NAPOLEON for services rendered to the cause of fiction.  In Miss MAY WYNNE’S A Spy for Napoleon (JARROLD) his misdeeds and those of his minions are made to serve the purpose of emphasizing the loyalty of the heroine to her lover.  This lover was an Englishman of a type sufficiently familiar in novels—­cold and masterful, but, for some reason not apparent to me, extremely attractive.  As he seemed to be roaming about France with the object of getting NAPOLEON out of the way by any means available, I am not certain that he was playing the game, even when we remember that the rules of it were lax enough at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  But we are not asked to weigh carefully the merits of character.  It is just a romance of incident, in which a hot pace is set at the start and kept up to the finish.  In short you get a good run for your money, and that is all about it.