with a book like this; either it pleases the reader or it doesn't, and
that is about all that can be said. One reason for my belief that Mr.
LUCAS's _Thoughts_ will please is that he has put them into the brain
of a definitely conceived and very well drawn character. They are told
in the form of letters by this character to his old tutor. The writer
is supposed to be the rather unattractive and self-conscious eldest
son of a noble house, who suffers from the presence of a father and
sister who think him a fool, and a brother whose charm is a continual
and painful contrast to his own lack of it. The special skill of the
letters is their self-revelation, which brings out the pathos of the
writer's position, while at the same time showing quite clearly the
defects that explained it. Mr. LUCAS, in short, does not commit the
error of making his hero merely a mute, misunderstood paragon, whom
anyone with common penetration must have recognised as such. On the
contrary, we sympathise with him, especially in the big tragedy of
his life, while quite admitting that to any casual acquaintance he
must have appeared only a dull and uninteresting egoist. This I call
clever, because it shows that Mr. LUCAS has created a real thinker,
rather than striven to give him any unusual profundity of thought. An
agreeable book.

* * * * *

In the sixteenth chapter of the First Part of _The Rocks of Valpré_
(FISHER UNWIN) _Trevor Mordaunt_ married _Christine Wyndham_, and on
the last page (which is the 511th) of the book, "she opened to him the
doors of her soul, and drew him within...." Granted that _Mordaunt_,
with the eyes of steel, was not exactly an oncoming man and that when
he married _Christine_ he received, as wedding presents, two or three
brothers-in-law who sponged hopelessly upon him, I still think that