being full of life and daring, have sighted a lady-chauffeur of a motor-ambulance and have thrown a friendly glance, even a froward smile, at her.  Waiving all questions of propriety, I hope that this was so, and that the lady-chauffeur was no less than “PAT BEAUCHAMP” herself, in the later stages of her career overseas.  Though her only response may have been to splash mud over me, I should feel happy, now, thus to have paid my respects to this gallant and high-spirited lady.  I count myself among the company, battalion, division, corps and army of her admirers.

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It certainly does not seem eight years, yet it must be fully that, since JOSEPH CONRAD in The English Review lifted a veil that lay between his admirers and an interesting personality with the pleasantly discursive papers which form the basis of the re-issued A Personal Record (DENT).  Between then and now Chance, that masterly but difficult book, has by a curious freak of public taste given Mr. CONRAD, hitherto the well-loved favourite of the relatively few, a much wider constituency.  To these late comers, rather than to the older (and of course superior) Conradists, who know it already, let me recommend this rambling, which is by no means to say aimless, account of the wanderings of the MS. of Almayer’s Folly, some queer entertaining scraps of the author’s family history, a description of the encounters with the original Almayer, and those vignettes of Marseilles which obviously were used as the background of The Arrow of Gold.  This record is one of those quiet friendly books that flatter the devotee by a sense of peculiar intimacy with his hero.  It is also engagingly characteristic.  Mr. CONRAD here unravels the fine threads of his personal history and philosophy with the same artful reserve and exquisite elaboration with which he evolves the creatures of his resourceful imagination.

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The Life of Liza Lehmann (UNWIN), written by herself, and finished, as her husband tells in a pathetic foot-note, “scarcely two weeks before her death,” is a book holding many special bonds of association with Punch, not least the fact that her father-in-law, Deputy J.T.  BEDFORD, was the author of that Robert, the City Waiter, who was among the most famous and popular of Mr. Punch’s early creations.  The volume that the writer has put together is the record of a busy, successful and, on the whole, happy life, passed in the company of interesting people, about many of whom Madame LEHMANN has remembered some entertaining story.  Chiefly, as is natural, the persons recorded are the musical folk of the last half-century, from JENNY LIND to Sir THOMAS BEECHAM; though in the allied Arts I was taken by a pleasing and new anecdote of ROBERT BROWNING reciting How they Brought the Good News into an Edison phonograph, and overcome