time and succumbed—­should constitute all his career, we have this notable and beautiful book.  If one had to put but a single epithet to it I should choose “radiant.”  At Eton, at Balliol, at the Embassies in Rome and Constantinople, and in the Army, CHARLES LISTER shed radiance.  All his many friends testify to this.  As for his letters, they are clear and gay and human; and they have also a sagacity that many older and more determined observers of life might envy; while that one to Lady DESBOROUGH upon the death of his great friend, JULIAN GRENFELL, is literature.  Every page is interesting, but some are far more than that; and at the end one has almost too moving a concept of an ardent idealistic English gentleman met too late.

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At first sight, perhaps, Nothing Matters (CASSELL) may sound to you a somewhat, shall I say, transatlantic title for a book published in these days, when we are all learning how enormously everything matters.  But this emotion will only last till you have read Sir HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE’S disarming little preface.  Personally, it left me regretting only one thing in the volume (or, to be more accurate, outside it), which was the design of its very unornamental wrapper—­a lapse, surely, from taste, for which it would probably be quite unfair to blame the writer of what lies within.  This is almost all of it excellent fooling, and includes a brace of longish short-stories (rather in the fantastic style of brother MAX); some fugitive pieces that you may recall as they flitted through the fields of journalism; with, for stiffening, a reprint of the author’s admirable lecture upon “The Importance of Humour in Tragedy.”  This is a title that you may well take as a motto for the whole book.  It will have, I think, a warm welcome from Sir HERBERT’S many friends and admirers, even should it turn out to be the case that some of his plots have been (in his own quaintly attractive phrase) “prophetically plagiarised” by other writers.  Certainly this welcome will not be lessened by the knowledge that all profits from the sale of the volume are to go to support a cause that, to all who love the Stage, will be far indeed from not mattering—­the fund to supplement the incomes of the wives and families of actors at the Front.  You may regard it therefore as the lightest of comedies played, like so many others, in the cause of charity, and put down your money with an approving conscience.

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Let no one whose heart has been touched beyond mere vicarious pride in the achievement of our brothers-in-arms at the gate of Paris allow himself to miss the detailed narrative of HENRI DUGARD in The Battle of Verdun (HUTCHINSON).  A good translation by F. APPLEBY HOLT, rather exceptional in these days of hurried conveyancing, does not detract from the vigour and movement of the story.  We, who only saw the long agony through the medium of the always inadequate