Notes on Novels. [These notes on the week's Fiction are not necessarily final. Reviews of a selection will follow.] THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX. BY HENRY HARLAND. Mr. Harland's distinguished touch is very apparent when one opens this novel and finds Peter Marchdale talking books and art with his landlady. His landlady, it should be explained, is the Duchessa di Santangiolo, and Peter is the tenant of her Villa Floriano. The Duchessa "lives there, at Castel Ventirose,' Marietta explains as she removes the coffee things; she owns all, all this country, all these houses all, all.' 'All Lombardy?' said Peter, without emotion." The emotion comes later, the Cardinal with it. Mr. Harland's chapters are not as other men's. His fourth consists of ten lines, his twelfth of sixteen pages. (John Lane. 6s.) THE MINX. - BY "IOTA." Mr. Adcock's stories of East End life have shown a real grip of humble life, its humours and sorrows. And here we have, by a happy inspiration, a series of pictures of the unwritten humours, rivalries, and tragedies of life in mean streets incident to the recent calling out of the reserves, and the war fever. The story called "A Boer in Britain is an admirably humorous account of a fatuous, inconsequential, patriotic row in a barber's shop, which threatened to be serious, but ended in an awkward pause, broken only by the barber's call, "Naixt, please!" (Hodder & Stoughton. 2s. 6d.) Mr. Marsh is the author of The Beetle, Tom Ossington's Ghost, and other novels, and he has imagined himself competent to write a story founded on the idea that Christ had come to London. Christ suddenly appears in Bryanston-square, in the midst of a crowd collected by a fatal bicycle accident. "He inclined His hand toward the dead man, saying: 'Arise, you who sleep.' Immediately he that was dead stood up. He seemed bewildered, and exclaimed as in a fit of passion: 'That's a nice spill. Curse the infernal slippery road!' Then he turned and saw Who was standing at his side." From this Mr. Marsh proceeds to other intrepidities. (Grant Richards. 6s.) THE DEVIL AND THE INVENTOR. BY AUSTIN FRYERS. Inventors may enjoy a story in which an inventor sells himself more or less to the Devil. The bargain provides that Philbrick shall be given the power to place his ideas before the public. But if within three weeks of the exhibition of one of his inventions it has not yielded him £250, the Devil is to exact a cupful of his blood. Philbrick begins with a Soundless Piano. (Pearson Ltd. 3s. 6d.) This is Major Griffiths's usual blend a good one in its way of love, crime, and detection. Inspector Faske is a satisfying detective of the cat-like order. "His grey moustachois, brushed out straight, might have belonged to a veteran mouser accustomed to pounce promptly on its prey." (Macqueen. 6s.) HIS LORDSHIP'S LEOPARD. BY DAVID DWIGHT WELLS. A readable absurdity by the author of Her Ladyship's Elephant. We have a tissue of strange events, including the abduction of a bishop and the supposed visit of a Spanish gunboat to English shores during the SpanishAmerican war. The author is right in insisting that this "serious attempt to while away an idle hour " is not a fit subject for the application of the higher criticism." But the idle hour is whiled. (Heinemann. 6s.) LYONA GRIMWOOD, SPINSTER. By L. HIGGIN. Those who like tangles for their own sake will like untangling the identity of Lyona Grimwood, who begins by being murdered, then disappears, and becomes someone else, while remaining Lyona Grimwood. We leave the plot to the tangle-loving reader, promising him, however, some entertaining character-sketches of the gossips and old maids of a Midland town. (Pearson Ltd. 6s.) A YOUNG DRAGON. BY SARAH TYTLER. Mrs. Tytler's latest story grows out of a bet made by a self-satisfied Scottish laird, who is past his youth, that he will woo and marry a wife within a month. Despite this promise of farce the story takes hold of the reader, and the end is touching. (Chatto & Windus. 6s.) WAYWARD HEARTS. BY DARBY RYAN. wealth and luxury can buy you shall have.' . . . Ah, it was a happy birthday for the poor . . the old Manor." (Digby, Long & Co. 6s.) AN AMERICAN COUNTESS. BY MRS. URBAN HAWKESWOOD. Here we have the mercenary marriage of a young English lord clashing with his love of another woman, an artist. A readable, highly unconventional story. (Macqueen. 6s.) THE SEAFARERs. BY JOHN BLOUNDELLE-BURTON. Its title exactly fits this story by the author of The Clash of Arms. A hearty, thoroughly readable tale of the sea, in which shipwreck and sunshine answer to the unsmooth course of love. (Pearson Ltd. 68.) THE EMPIRE MAKERS. BY HUME NISBET. A romance of adventure and war in South Africa. The author leaves the reader in no doubt about his views. He regrets that it is too soon for him to show the reader “the wind-up of the vile oligarchy of Pretoria tyrants." How ever, the story stretches to the relief of Kimberley, and the writer distributes phrases like "the iniquitous and false Boer," the "most inhuman and bloody-minded Kruger," "this Cronje, the vile and brutal murderer." (White & Co. 6s.) The Balzac Letters Controversy. THE outline of Balzac's passion for Mme. Hanska, a passion conceived and executed (if we may use the term) in the grand romantic manner by a master of that manner, is fairly well known to the public. The inmost and secret nature of it, at all points of its progress, has perhaps not yet been finally ascertained. In 1896 M. le Vicomte de Spoelberch de Louvenjoul published his version of it in Un Roman d'Amour, a work which was received with the respect due to the author's unchallenged position as the first living authority on the facts of Balzac's life. M. de Louvenjoul's Histoire des Euvres de Balzac, we may recall in passing, constitutes practically the twenty-fifth volume of the great Calmann Lévy édition définitive of Balzac's works, and when he speaks other students are accustomed to listen, as barristers listen to a judge. A large part of Balzac's letters to Mme. Hanska were included in his Correspondance, the twenty-fourth volume of the édition définitive; but last year M. de Louvenjoul (though his name does not appear on the title-page of the book) gave to the world, under the title Lettres à l'Etrangère, what purports to be a full collection of all existing letters from "Nore" to the cara contessina, up to the death of the cara contessina's husband. If this collection is authentic-and both M. de Louvenjoul and the house of Calmann Lévy (in their communication to us of the 4th ult.) vouch for its absolute authenticity -then Un Roman d'Amour is more or less justified, and Balzac stands revealed as a man even as other Frenchmen are. But here arrives Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, and with breath-taking intrepidity roundly asserts that many of the letters have been tampered with in order to bring them into line with Un Roman d'Amour, and that a number of them are "infamous forgeries." Miss Wormeley,* we should mention, is probably the chief English-speaking authority on Balzac. She has translated all his novels; she has written an exhaustive Memoir of him; she has collected his “ personal opinions”; and everything that she writes about him abundantly shows that she is a thorough expert. Further, she is a woman of experience; she witnessed the entry of Napoleon's remains into Paris on December 15, 1840, and she evidently knows her France. In remembering the claims of M. de Louvenjoul, we must not forget those of this venerable and distinguished scholar. It is a pity that with knowledge does not always come the skill to handle it. Miss Wormeley states her case badly. There is scarcely a sentence in the "fighting" preface to her translation of the impugned letters, scarcely a note of hers in all the seven hundred and fifty-five pages of the volume, which does not betray the absence of the true editorial temperament at once nimble and sedate, enthusiastic and judicial, and always impassively and inexorably polite. She bewilders where she should convince; she relieves Kimberley when she should be marching direct to Pretoria; she gets angry; she utters an exclamation instead of a demonstration; she talks darkly of Honoré de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Letters to Madame Hanska, born Countess Rzewuska, afterwards Madame Honoré de Balzac. 1833-1846. (Hardy Pratt & Co., Boston, U.S.A. $1.50.) conspiracies; she is offended; she is indignaut; and, venial yet most annoying sin, she neither numbers the letters nor provides an index. The French edition is numbered, but not indexed. But she has a primâ facie case-that is the wonderful part of it all; she has a case to support her double charge against M. de Louvenjoul of sensualising and degrading Balzac's gorgeous passion and of being a party to the garbling and inventing of documents. Very briefly, her case is as follows: 66 In the volume of Correspondance (1876) an editorial note states that the correspondence with Mme. Hanska, as there given, is not complete. "Unfortunately," the note runs, a part of this correspondence was burned in Moscow in a fire which occurred in Mme. Hanska's residence. It must, therefore, be remarked that in the letters of this series two or three gaps occur, all the more regrettable because those which escaped the fire present a keen interest." In spite of this clear statement, no explanation is offered in Lettres à l'Etrangère (1899) of the manner in which the epistles lacking in 1876 were redeemed from their alleged combustion. A brief footnote to the first letter merely mentions the name of M. Louvenjoul, "entre les mains de qui sont les originaux de ces lettres." same footnote says that Balzac inserted an acknowledgment of Mme. Hanska's first letter in the Quotidienne of December 9, 1832. But in a letter dated January 1, 1846, Balzac writes to Mme. Hanska: This One year more, dear, and I take it with pleasure, for these years, these thirteen years which will be consummated in February on the happy day a thousand times blest when I received that adorable letter, starred with happiness and hope, seem to me links indestructible, eternal. The fourteenth will begin in two months. This would apparently make the date of the first letter The advertisement could not therefore February, 1833. have appeared in the Quotidienne in December, 1832. Nor could the first letter of Lettres à l'Etrangère (which, by the way, is not the first letter of the whole correspondence) have been dated "January, 1833," as printed. Arguing from Balzac's letter of January 1, 1846, just quoted, Miss Wormeley seeks to overthrow other dates in the printed correspondence. Again, there is the famous letter of Balzac to his sister, Mme. Surville (October, 1833), which was first printed in the latter's Memoir of her brother, published in 1856. This letter appeared, twenty years later, in the Correspondance, in a form slightly, but not materially, altered. It encloses the proofs of Le Médecin de Campagne, asks the recipient to correct them, and gives details of an interview with three enthusiastic German families. It contains no reference to Mme. Hanska, and is entirely harmless. In 1896, however, this letter appears a third time, in M. Louvenjoul's Un Roman d'Amour, and now it is enlarged to more than twice its original length, and the matter of 1856 and 1876, considerably altered in phraseology, becomes merely a coda to some extensive remarks upon Balzac's first meeting with Mme. Hanska at Neufchâtel in October, 1833. The description is decidedly an offence against good taste: Alas a damned husband never left us for one second during five days. He kept between the petticoat of his wife and my waistcoat. The essential thing is that we are twenty-seven years old, beautiful to admiration; that we possess the handsomest black hair in the world, the soft, deliciously delicate skin of brunettes, that we have a love of a little hand, a heart of twenty-seven, naïve; . . . imprudent to the point of flinging herself upon my neck before all the world. . . . I don't know whom to tell this to; certainly it is not to her, the great lady, the terrible marquise, who, suspecting the journey, comes down from her pride, and intimates an order that I shall go to her. . . . It is not [either] to her, the most treasured, who has more jealousy for me than a mother has for the milk she gives her child. She does not like L'Etrangère, precisely because L'Etrangère appears to be the very thing for me. And finally, it is not to her who wants her daily ration of love, and who, though voluptuous as a thousand cats, is neither graceful nor womanly. It is to you, my good sister, the former companion of my miseries and tears, that I wish to tell my joy. She Truly a pretty letter for a good sister to receive! Miss Wormeley denies the authenticity of what she calls "the slanderous language of the first part" of it. " of it. She pertinently asks why the second part (common to all three versions, relating to the German families and the proofcorrecting) should differ in phraseology, as it does, from Mme. Surville's own edition of 1856 and the édition définitive of 1876. Having proved satisfactorily to herself (1) deception, (2) falsification of dates, (3) forgery, Miss Wormeley lays a finger on many letters and parts of letters throughout her translation of Lettres à l'Etrangère, and brands them as either concocted or garbled. points out that after Balzac's first interview with his beloved the tone of the letters changes, becoming grosser, less lofty, less pure. She characterises the letters from February 15 to March 11, 1834, as "infamous forgeries." And earlier than this, earlier even than the first meeting, she discovers evidences of forgery, or something as bad. Thus, for example (pp. 80-81), she exclaims upon the presentation of Mme. Hanska's character in the letter of November 10, 1833, where Balzac, protesting against the lady's jealousy, quotes her as having angrily written, "Va aux pieds de ta Marquise." Miss Wormeley says it is impossible that a woman like Mme. Hanska should ever have written, "Va aux pieds de ta Marquise.' "There are certain things that a woman of breeding cannot do or say." So much for Miss Wormeley's case. For ourselves, we admit that at the first blush it rather impressed us. On reflection, however, we have come to regard it as very weak-and certainly as not proven. In the first place, it is inherently of the highest improbability. Granting that M. Louvenjoul's eminent services to bibliography give him no title whatever to consideration as an assayer of the loveaffairs of genius, and granting that his estimate of the Balzac - Hanska passion in Un Roman d'Amour is-shall we say?-the estimate of a book-collector and connoisseur of curiosities, why should he make himself a party to forgery, deception and garbling, in order to blacken the fame of the writer to whom he has devoted his whole life, and to "smirch the memory " of a dead woman? Even if he had desired to do these things, he could have done them with less clumsiness, less trouble, and less risk than are implied by Miss Wormeley's theory. In the second place, Miss Wormeley's alleged proofs are not, even without special knowledge, quite unanswerable. 1. There certainly ought to have been an editorial introduction to Lettres à l'Etrangère, reconciling the fact of the appearance of this volume with the statement (1876) as to the Moscow fire; but the absence of such an explanation is not a proof that no explanation will or can be given. 2. Falsification of dates. This charge rests solely on the single passage in Balzac's letter of January 1, 1846. Might not Balzac have made an error? People frequently mis-date the most important events of their lives. All these letters were written at speed, and Miss Wormeley herself remarks that "the man who wrote them never read them over." Also, is there anything to show positively that Balzac, in the quoted passage, was referring to the first letter received from Mine. Hanska? Might he not have been referring to some well-remembered letter in which the loved one first exhibited a special and (to him) transcendent tenderness? 3. The letter to Mme. Surville, as printed in 1896. The non-appearance of the first part of this letter in the versions of 1856 and 1876 is no proof that the first part is a forgery, for neither Mme. Surville nor Mme. Hanska would have cared to print it in full. Mme. Surville herself tampered with the letter, however slightly. Both the Calmann Lévys and M. Louvenjoul have implied, if they have not stated, that Mme. Hanska also tampered with Balzac's letters to her, and this is beyond doubt. Miss Wormeley, while endeavouring to rebut the insinuation, has to admit that Mme. Hanska added to some of the letters affectionate expressions to herself, 'apparently from other letters"; also that she suppressed passages. As for the language and the taste of the first part of the letter to Mme. Surville, they are vile. But for ourselves, we see no strong presumption against Balzac being guilty of the passage, and of any of the other passages which Miss Wormeley tries to nail to the counter as false. This sort of thing may co-exist with imaginative greatness-in fact, has done so very often. Take the supreme imaginative writers (especially of the Continent), and say which of their secret lives-these men whom mankind unites to reverence-would bear the inspection of a board of matrons. Conceive the limpness of Goethe or Dumas after such a test! Genius may do what it likesand does. Balzac belonged to his period. Also he had his bad and his good days. He was capable of anything except dishonesty. Decidedly he was never an authority on good taste. There is a passage of surpassing foulness on page 55 of Miss Wormeley's translation, and perhaps Miss Wormeley will say that it is forged or garbled. We prefer to remember that Balzac wrote the latter part of La Fille aux Yeux d' Or; that he had a lingering affection for those incredible cads de Marsay and Rubempré; that he created the appalling Arabella Dudley (and relished. doing it); that he soiled Le Lys dans la Vallée with some of the most subtly odious mawkishness ever written. Balzac could be anybody, and was everybody by turns. Nothing that has come or may come to light about him will affect his greatness, or the world's admiration for him, in the least. 4. Miss Wormeley, in remarking on the change in the tone of the letters after Balzac had first met Mme. Hanska, does not seem to have realised that the coincidence of the change with the meeting is unfavourable to her contentions. Up to that time Balzac had been worshipping a bodiless spirit. What more natural than that its embodiment should be followed by the materialisation of his heavenly transports, and a general declension from the clouds. 5. Mme. Hanska's character. Miss Wormeley's view of the contessina's character is surely somewhat roseate. Mme. Hanska was a very jealous woman; and that she was at least an unconventional woman is clear from the admitted facts of the inception and continuance of her friendship with Balzac. A jealous woman, especially when it does not happen to be her husband who arouses the jealousy, is no longer "a woman of breeding" she is a jealous woman. We see no reason whatever why, in a fit of petulance, Mme. Hanska should not fling out precisely that phrase, "Va aux pieds de ta Marquise." By such and similar arguments, it occurs to us, Miss Wormeley's position might be assailed, and perhaps carried. We should hesitate to admit that she has proved anything of real moment against M. Louvenjoul or other persons unnamed. That in bringing her charge she was actuated by pious motives we do not deny, but so grave an accusation should not have been breathed until it could be substantiated beyond the possibility of doubt in an unprejudiced mind. Our opinion is that while M. Louvenjoul may have taken a too masculine and cynical a view of the Hanska affair, Miss Wormeley has elevated not only Balzac but Mme. Hanska to the position of idols above our common humanity. On another occasion, avoiding controversial points, we shall deal with the subject-matter of these interesting letters from the greatest of all novelists to a woman whose title to fame is that she kept his devotion for seventeen years, chiefly by means of the post. "You had better let me show you round, sir, there are holes you might easily put your leg through." And Constable G. 116 walked with me into a desolation surrounded by hoardings. I was in the City-road, behind the Eagle Tavern, and the scene before me was a grotesque of tawdry ruin. The old Grecian Theatre was on our left; in front of it rose carved wooden pillars, black and rotten. Delicate vases and finials stood against the sky, awry, giltless, and forlorn. In this garden lamps had twinkled, and many a foolish heart had beaten to the waltz music in the mad, sad, bad-but doubtless sweet-nights of the sixties. Nothing seemed so dead as those carnivals except these husks of the theatres, grottoes, and band-stands that had witnessed them. Our voices sounded strange. The sparrows twittered on tree and broken roof. We entered the theatre. Boxes and tiers spread around in what had once been a circle of vast cheerfulness; now their emptiness smote the mind. Mouldy Cupids and tattered floral designs rioted still over the ceiling and round the dress-circle. The stage had been removed, and the pit which represented it was open to the sky. The orchestra was now the tattered edge of a precipice, but the vast back wall of the stage still reared itself aloft, and in its crevices the sparrows were building their nests. G. 116 talked, but I hardly listened. My thoughts went back thirty-six years, to my childhood in Rio Janeiro, when England was only a dream not yet come true. Heat, bananas, and a snatch of song-how they resurged! Heat, bananas, and a song on the lips of my father's clerks. It was the first song that gave me an image of London-not the London of St. Paul's, of the Abbey, of the Lord Mayor's Show, or of the Queen of England surrounded by her glittering troops-but the London of everyday life, of the pavement, and the holiday. I say, how it resurged! Up and down the City Road, In and out the Eagle, This, then, was the place! I stood and gazed, where once my fancy hovered blind. A dull coincidence, perhaps ; but these are the things that make one's life, and seem worth telling. George Meredith and his Critics. THE critics are not such arbiters of literary destiny as you might think. Not only do their deliverances affect but little that immediate popularity, estimable in pounds, shillings, and pence, which is to-day the favourite gauge of merit, but they have not even, in the long run, much to say to the establishment of that more permanently based reputation which rests ultimately with the "acute and honourable minority." A writer will make his way, if he is to make it at all, not because people are told to read him, but because he has something to say which they wish to hear. The hostility of the critics will not for long bar this process; their laudation will not sensibly hasten it. Nevertheless, as each great writer moves to fame, his way is marked and its stages heralded by a succession of critical utterances. These become, as it were, rallying points and battle cries for his partisans; discussion crystallises round them; they strike the key-notes for interpreters. Hence the importance, for the biographer and the literary student, of histories of critical opinion. Shakespearean literature is vast; but few volumes in it equal in value and fascination that "Centurie of Prayse" in which Dr. Ingleby and others were at the pains to garner all that was notably, and even much that was trivially, said about Shakespeare before the end of the seventeenth century. Something of the same interest belongs to the bibliography of George Meredith, contributed by Mr. John Lane, under the title "George Meredith and his Reviewers," to Mr. Le Gallienne's George Meredith: Some Characteristics, in 1891, and since brought up to date in a recent edition. Mr. Lane reprinted in full what is probably the most striking thing ever said by a critic of Meredith-the famous letter on "Modern Love" which Mr. Swinburne was stung to send to the Spectator of June 7, 1862. It is magnificent praise, and nowadays, of course, needless apology: Mr. Meredith is one of the three or four poets now alive whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design as it is often faultless in result. The present critic falls foul of him for dealing with "a deep and painful subject on which he has no conviction to express.' There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose; the business of verse writing is hardly to express convictions; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt in dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that. As to subject, it is too much to expect that all schools of poetry are to be for ever subordinate to the one just now so much in request with us, whose scope of sight is bounded by the nursery walls; that all Muses are to bow down before her who babbles, with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dangling delights of a child's coral; and jingles with flaccid fingers one knows not whether a jester's or a baby's bells. We have not too many writers capable of duly handling a subject worth the serious interest of man. As to execution, take almost any sonnet at random out of this series, and let any man qualified to judge for himself of metre, choice of expression, and splendid language, decide on its claims. And, after all, the test will be unfair, except as regards metrical or pictorial merit, every section of this great progressive poem being connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship. Then Mr. Swinburne goes on to refer to one of the greatest sonnets of "Modern Love"-" a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out." He does not quote the whole of it; but we do not propose to refrain from the pleasure of doing so here. We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, Love that had robbed us so thus blessed our dearth! The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud Love that had robbed us of immortal things, And still I see across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings. Mr. Lane is unable to tell us the name of the writer who reviewed Richard Feverel in the Times in 1859. Mr. Henley struck a swashing blow for Meredith, and, at the same time, expressed a very practical opinion on a moot journalistic point, in 1879, when he reviewed The Egoist in our own columns and in three other periodicals. Some fragments of these and other criticisms are collected in Views and Reviews, and very pretty reading they make. Mr. Henley's praise is as generous as Mr. Swinburne's: it is far less undiscriminating. "To read your Meredith straight off," he says, "is to have an indigestion of epigram ; and we hardly know how those whom Meredith's brilliance alarms and discomposes could wish to better Mr. Henley's statement of their case. He writes with the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As Shakespeare, in Johnson's praise, lost the world for a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of professional wit. He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief. Stevenson, again, is memorable among Meredithians. The Egoist was of "the inner circle of my intimates," and of Rhoda Fleming he writes as "that wonderful and painful book, long out of print and hunted for at bookstalls like an Aldine." There is, somewhere or other, a very fine passage on The Egoist, in which Stevenson dwells on the almost painful recognition by every honest and competent male reader of himself in Sir Willoughby Patterne. This we have known long since and lost again, and have sought for it without result through the four volumes of essays. Is it in the paper on "Books Which Have Influenced Me" which Stevenson contributed to a series of British Weekly Extras in 1887? If so, we suppose that, like so many Stevensoniana, it has fallen into the hands of the traffickers, and is only reprinted for millionaires. The most noteworthy-perhaps the only noteworthydepreciation of Meredith (for you can hardly call Mr. Henley's balanced criticism depreciation) was that whereby he was confounded in a single condemnation with Mr. Henry James in Mr. William Watson's National Review article on "Fiction-Plethoric and Anæmic." Correspondence. The Missing Word. SIR,-In relation to Mr. F. G. Cole's letter I beg permission for a few words in reply. From his definition of the term " Englander" we are given to understand that it is a new word coined for the occasion and having no racial significance whatever. I cannot look upon Englander as an entirely new word, as the title England forms the first two syllables of it, and, in spite of Mr. Cole's assertion, I maintain that it is stamped all over with racial significance. I again reiterate that no Scotsman, Irish, or Welsh, with any love of his native country would accept this word as a fitting title for a subject of the British Empire. Some word must be coined which will contain no element in its composition that will slight or give offence to the people of any nation of the Empire, and if that cannot be done, then better with none at all.— I am, &c., H. LOGAN. Sandgate, Prestwick: May 1, 1900. Esquire. SIR,-I see that one of the words prohibited by Mr. William Cullen Bryant (vide the article entitled "An Index Expurgatorius of Words" in your issue for April 28) is the appellation "esquire." May I venture to suggest that in so doing Mr. Bryant showed a lamentable ignorance of all that pertains to the science of heraldry? It may not be generally known that only certain persons are entitled, by right heraldic, to the use of the word esquire. The general impression seems to be that anyone who possesses a certain amount of landed property, or has an income of not less than, say, £500 a year, is entitled to be called "esquire." But, as has been aptly remarked, "no money whatsoever, or landed property, will give a man properly this title, unless he comes within certain rules," which may be thus stated: The following are alone entitled to the use of the word esquire: 1. Esquires of the king's body, limited to four. 2. The eldest sons of knights, and their eldest sons respectively. 3. The eldest sons of the youngest sons of barons, and others of the greater nobility. 4. Those whom the King invests with collars of SS., as the Kings at Arms, Heralds, &c. 5. Esquires to the Knights of the Bath, being their attendants on their installation. 6. Sheriffs of Counties and Justices of the Peace (the latter only during their tenure of office), and all those who bear special office in the King's household, as Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Carvers, Sewers, Cup-bearers, Pensioners, Serjeants-at-Arms. 7. "Counsellors at law," bachelors of divinity, law, and physic.-I am, &c. Oxford: May 1, 1900. New Books Received. H. B. Mr. Warner has played cricket under Lord Hawke's captaincy in all parts of the British colonies—" upon fields that are almost within sound of Niagara and in towns that have since undergone the hardships of siege and bombardment." In Barbados, in Trinidad, in British Guiana, he has "sped the flying ball." This, then, is a book of more than cricketing interest. Here, if anywhere, cricket appears not as a game but as an institution, dear as their language to Anglo-Saxons. (Heinemann.) |