precisionist. But after all it is what she has to say that matters
most; and the story of _The Candid Courtship_ will hold you amused
and curious to the end. I will not spoil it by re-telling, save to
indicate that (as the title implies) it is about a suitor who, in
proposing to the girl of his choice, confessed to her that he had a
past. Not a very lurid past, but quite bad enough for the G.O.H.C.,
who happened to entertain strong views on sex-equality. So, as vulgar
persons say, the fat was in the fire--more especially when the lady
of the past turned up again, not past at all, but very pleasantly
intriguing with another, and that other own brother to the girl
herself. A pretty complication, and leading up to an admirable scene
of tragi-comedy over a double elopement and a pursuit, which you must
certainly read. Do not, however, be led to think that the story is at
all farcically treated; Miss MEARS is far too serious an artist to
neglect the graver aspects of her theme. Briefly, an excellently human
and stimulating novel, whose only drawback is that recent events have
caused the suffrage atmosphere in which it is sat to taste somewhat
stale.

* * * * *

Between anarchy and anarchy the history of unhappy Mexico is
spanned for the space of a generation by the colossal figure of the
soldier-president, _Diaz_ (CONSTABLE). Mr. DAVID HANNAY, writing with
exquisite literary workmanship in the series of biographies entitled
collectively _Makers of the Nineteenth Century_, presents this
typically "strong" man as neither hero nor villain, but as a human
being with human limitations, even more as a Mexican with the
characteristics of a Mexican. Amongst a populace hopelessly divided by
race, untrained in self-government and cursed with a natural twist for