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A much misunderstood man is Count BERNSTORFF, formerly German Ambassador at Washington.  While we were all supposing him to be a bomb-laden conspirator, pulling secret strings in Mexico or Canada or Japan from the safe protection afforded to his embassy, really he was the most innocent of men, anxious for nothing but to keep unsophisticated America from being trapped by the wiles of the villain Britisher.  One has it all on the best of authority—­his own—­in My Three Years in America (SKEFFINGTON).  Of course awkward incidents did occur, which have to be explained away or placidly ignored, but really, if the warlords at home had not been so invincibly tactless in the matter of drowning citizens of the United States, this simple and ingenuous diplomat might very well have succeeded, he would have us believe, in persuading President WILSON to declare in favour of a peace-loving All-Highest.  As an essay in special pleading the book does not lack ingenuity, and as an example of the familiar belief that other peoples will shut their eyes and swallow whatever opinions the Teuton thinks good to offer them, it may have interest for the psychologist.  For the rest it is a very prosy piece of literature, only saved occasionally in its dulness by the unconscious crudity of the hatreds lurking beneath its mask of plausibility.  One of these hatreds is clearly directed against Ambassador GERARD, to whose well-known book this volume is in some sort a counter-blast.  Neither a historian seeking truth nor a plain reader seeking recreation will have any difficulty in choosing between them.

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Mr. D.A.  BARKER, in The Great Leviathan (LANE), doesn’t merely leave you to make the obvious remark about his having taken Mr. H.G.  WELL’S loose, tangential and, for a beginner, extraordinarily dangerous method as a model, but rubs it in (stout fellow!) by transplanting his hero to India, seemingly in order to have excuse for writing a passage which one would say was obviously inspired by that gorgeous description of the jungle in The Research Magnificent.  Mr. BARKER has enough matter for two (or three) novels and enough skill in portraiture to make them more coherent and plausible than this.  The theme is old but freshly seen. Tom Seton, resolved to avoid risking for his beloved the unhappiness which his mother had found in the bondage of marriage, offers her—­indeed imposes on her—­a free union.  How the pressure of The Great Leviathan (Mrs. Grundy—­well, that’s not perhaps quite the whole of the idea, but it will serve) drove her into the shelter of a formal marriage with a devoted don, I leave you to gather.  I don’t think the author quite succeeds in making Mary’s defection inevitable, nor do I see the significance of the apparently quite irrelevant background of Indian philosophy and intrigue.  But here’s a well-written book, with sound positive qualities outweighing the defects of inexperience.