the human limitations, blessed and cursed with all the intricacies allotted by Providence to the sex.  Her trouble was that she had to face life as it is, and this she found very trying.  She suffered from her marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and from her abortive grapplings both with the abstract problems of her soul and the concrete mischiefs of her female friends.  The influence of IBSEN and a militant Suffragette didn’t help her meditations, and when her husband died she had the mortification to find that the first man of her own age who professed love to her was no man but a series of artistic poses.  Of her difficulties, real enough up to this point, the solution was the fraudulent Henry, fraudulent because he was just a stage hero whose actions and conversation resembled nothing on earth. Henry, in fact, is the sort of person that doesn’t exist, and, if he did, would be intolerable to everybody except a novel reader worked up to a climax.  I doubt if even such a reader could stand the fellow on a longer acquaintance.  To this conclusion all must come in their saner moments, and yet most will, I think, finish the book in one spell and be under the delusion at the end of it that all their troubles would be solved at once if only their friends would talk and conduct themselves more like Henry.

* * * * *

In Theodore Roosevelt:  an Autobiography (MACMILLAN) the ex-President shows us how it was done:  how he started life as a weakly lad and by perseverance made himself what he is to-day.  But what is he?  That is the insoluble problem.  No two people, least of all Americans, seem to agree on the point.  I have heard Mr. ROOSEVELT called everything from a charlatan to the Saviour of his Country.  For myself, if I may intrude my own view, I have always admired the “Bull Moose.”  But, since nobody on this earth, in America or out of it, can really understand American politics, my respect has been for Mr. ROOSEVELT’S private rather than his public performances.  And in the view that he is, take him all round, a pretty good sort of man, this book has confirmed me.  He has told his story well.  Nor is the Power of the Human “I” too much in evidence.  It is just a simple, straightforward tale of a particularly interesting life.  Whatever your views on Mr. ROOSEVELT may be, the fact remains that he has been a cowboy, a police commissioner of New York, a soldier on active service, and the President of God’s Country, suh; and a man must have an unusually negative personality if he cannot make entertainment for us out of that.  Now nobody has ever suspected Mr. ROOSEVELT of a negative personality; and it is certain that he has told a very entertaining story.  There are in this volume battle, murder, sudden death, outlaws, cowboys, bears, American politics, and the author’s views on the English blackbird, all handsomely illustrated, and the price is only what you would (or would not) pay for a stall to see a musical comedy.  It’s a bargain.