My appreciation of The Ancient Allan (CASSELL) may be measured by my keen disappointment on finding that the concluding pages of the book were absent in the copy vouchsafed to me, and that (apparently) in their place a double dose of pages 279-294 was offered.  Nevertheless I can safely assert that you will find this a yarn worth reading, for here Sir RIDER HAGGARD is in as good form as ever he was, when both he and Allan Quatermain were younger. Lady Ragnall, who is an old friend to readers of The Ivory Child, reappears here, having in her possession a mysterious and potent herb, which she persuades Allan to inhale.  Then the fun takes on a great liveliness. Allan is wafted back to the days when Egypt was under the domination of the Persians, and he in his ancient existence performed some of the very doughtiest of deeds.  No one living can tell such a tale with a greater dexterity and zest than Sir RIDER.  And at that I will leave it, with one more regret that I was not allowed to be present when Allan recovered from the effects of Taduki (the herb that did it).

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I find that when the medicine of thought is wrapped up in the jam of fiction I generally take both more willingly than either alone.  But if my author, holding out the spoonful, protests that the jam isn’t jam at all but part of the dose, then my mouth does not open with quite its usual happy confidence.  Miss W.M.  LETTS has said something of the sort about her great little book, Corporal’s Corner (WELLS, GARDNER, DARTON), and I wish she hadn’t.  It is cast in the form of letters written by a soldier in hospital to a nurse who has been good to him and whose lover has been killed at the Front.  Miss Letts introduces it with a foreword which conveys the impression that a real Corporal Jack wrote these letters to a real nurse; but the letters themselves convince—­or very nearly convince—­me that the foreword itself is a mere device of authorship, and one which defeats its own intention of adding weight to the wise and tender and often humorous things the writer has to say.  From his own death-bed Corporal Jack, together with his own love-story and that of his chum Mac, writes what he can of comfort to his friend, and whether his hand or Miss LETTS’S held the pen the book is the work of someone who knows all about sorrow, and only the initiated—­who must be many for a decade to come—­will know quite how well it is done.

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Of the late Mr. NOEL ROSS, who, to the infinite loss of British journalism, died at the early age of twenty-seven, Mr. Punch cannot trust himself to speak with the cold detachment of the critic.  He saw life with the clear eye of happy youth and set it down with the easy pen of a ready writer.  Coming from New Zealand, through the War, to England, his natural talents were at once recognised, and he won a position for himself on the staff of The Times.  In the leisure moments spared from the service of the Old Lady of Printing House Square, he would crack a jest, now and then, with the Old Sage of Bouverie Street.  Mr. EDWIN ARNOLD now publishes a collection of his writings under the title, Noel Ross and His Work, and Mr. Punch confines himself to commending the volume to his readers.