_Secrets of the Bosphorus_ (HUTCHINSON) is one of the happily large
number of books to which time and tardy-footed justice have now added
an unwritten chapter that makes amends for all. But for the glories
of the last few months I think I could hardly have borne to read many
of these "revelations" of Mr. HENRY MORGENTHAU, sometime American
Ambassador to Turkey. They make strange and often tragic reading. One
of them is already famous: the disclosure of the narrow margin by
which the attack of the Allied fleets upon the Dardanelles came short
of victory. For that, with all its ghastly sequence of misadventure,
no happy end can quite compensate. But one may read more pleasantly
now of the Prussian Baron WANGENHEIM, sitting the day long on a bench
before his official residence to exult publicly in what looked like
the triumphal march to Paris. Mr. MORGENTHAU has many other matters
of interest in his note-book, a large part of which is occupied by the
story, almost incredible even in an age of horrors, of the planned
slaughter by the Turkish rulers, with Germany as accessory before and
after the act, of "at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as 1,000,000"
Armenians. He rightly calls this murder of a nation probably the
blackest deed in all the foul record of the war, in which (at the
precise moment of its execution) the same people who now protest
against the severity of our terms were taking a horrible and ruthless
joy. The reminder is apt.

* * * * *

Much of the pleasure that I have just enjoyed over Mr. ARTHUR SYMONS'
essays of travel in _Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands_ (COLLINS)
belongs to the wistful joy of recollection: remembered loveliness in
the beautiful places of which he writes so vividly, remembered peace
of the quiet unpreoccupied days in which they were written. The