SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY. By Robert Lynd. (Grant Richards.
7s. 6d.)
Mr. Lynd brings out books so quickly, collects and reprints his newspaper essays so assiduously, that we begin to shake our heads and say that it will not do. Yet it will do, for each new book charms us out of our ill-humour, each one more than excuses its own existence. Unlike most men's periodical essays, Mr. Lynd's actually read better in a book than they do separately in the papers they first appeared in. They have a quality that is often talked about, but actually very rarely discovered, and that is charm. Mr. Lynd is sane and tolerant without ever being platitudinous, witty without ever being ill-natured, sparkling without ever being strained, gently paradoxical (for the essay is talk, and what is talk without paradox ?) without ever really departing from those sound ethical judgments that underlie the work of all men who write from the heart. Given such an author, his subject hardly matte's. He visits us as an old friend visits us, and we like }Ain to talk of what he will. In this new volume he talks of changing houses, of keeping the Sabbath, of good luck, of dresses, of beggars, of wild life in London, and so forth. If we declare that the book as a whole hardly falls short of its magnificent opening, we are giving it very high praise indeed, for its opening sentence runs as follows : "Not to have seen a kingfisher leaves the world full of a mysterious beauty." Could anything be better ? Or, in another vein, a vein of gentle badinage, could anything be better than his essay on Lyons's tea-shops in this present collection : "Their white. and-gold faces and their polished windows are as noticeable as the painted signs of inns. They have a nice suggestion that luxury has been democratized and brought within the reach of anybody who has threepence in his pocket. They seem to say that there is no need to go to White Cities in order to be happy while toasted scones may be eaten within from marble tables. Could Sardanapalus himself ask for anything better than to be allowed to sit at a marble table and cat steak-and-kidney pudding from a silver fork 1" Sardanapalus, if his taste has improved, would only need Mr. Lynd's new book, propped against the cruet, to be completely happy.
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