[_4 Apr. '08_]

An important book on an important town is to be issued by Messrs. Methuen.
The town is London, and the author Mr. Wilfred Whitten, known to
journalism as John o' London. Considering that he comes from
Newcastle-on-Tyne (or thereabouts), his pseudonym seems to stretch a
point. However, Mr. Whitten is now acknowledged as one of the foremost
experts in London topography. He is not an archæologist, he is a
humanist--in a good dry sense; not the University sense, nor the silly
sense. The word "human" is a dangerous word; I am rather inclined to
handle it with antiseptic precautions. When a critic who has risen high
enough to be allowed to sign his reviews in a daily paper calls a new book
"a great human novel," you may be absolutely sure that the said novel
consists chiefly of ridiculous twaddle. Mr. Whitten is not a humanist in
that sense. He has no sentimentality, and a very great deal of both wit
and humour.

* * * * *

He is also a critic admirably sane. Not long ago he gave a highly
diverting exhibition of sanity in a short, shattering pronouncement upon
the works of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson and the school which has
acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The wonder
was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to the papers
to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before the _Academy_
blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of a journal of
dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own reviewers, Mr.
Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff. He furnished the
substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace of the personality of