Shorter Notices
MRS. BONE'S HMV of Oxford is probably better suited to the reader in bed than the eager tourist, though its format might be uncomfortably large for either. She assumes a good deal of knowledge both of topo-' graphy and manners, and she moves authoritatively up and down the High and the Broad and the Meadows, not so much with a visitor like Pepys who " came to Oxford, a very sweet place," as with an undergraduate who has finished his schools and before going down would like to absorb all the historical titbits he has neglected in three or four years of taking his university for granted. Mrs. Bone is perhaps at her most successful in imparting miscellaneous information from the more remote past. She ignores the day before yesterday, and in a chapter on balloons, for instance, has nothing to say of Miss Tallulah Bankhead or even Mr. Giles Playfair. hi her favourite period, the Renaissance, it is more surpris- ng to find a long chapter on stained glass, showing close knowledge of Abram van Linge's Jonah in Christ Church, but without any reference to his other Jonah" with the great fish " in University College. Her gift for conveying the subtler tones of an atmo- sphere is perhaps not very strong, but the illustrations by Sir Muirhead Bone, many of them in colour, are so numerous and his touch so confident that we are well content to take the tone from him. In the quarter of a century that has passed since the publi- cation of The London Perambulator, Sir Muirhead Bone has mellowed a little, and Oxford can accept such a change more gratefully than London. TANGYE LEAN.
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