IF there were any word stronger than delicious to express
deliciousness we should use it about The London Peranthatator. " Rejoice, oh ! London hearts rejoice, rejoice true lovers all." It is an entirely original book about London. The pile of other new books on the same subject do not in the least detract from its value. It is a real offering to London, the mighty and beautiful city whose charm empties the countryside, stops the plough, and holds up the traffic. London's truest lovers grow anxious when they sec the devastation wrought by her attractions, but still they arc in love, and in Mr. James Bone and Mr. Muirhead Bone they have found a spokesman and an artist able to express their infatuation. Mr. Muirhead Bone's etchings are too well known to need praise. The illus-
trations of this book, however, will appeal_ to so .many men and women who are not equipped as technical critics that it is
permissible to look at them from the point of view of the Londoner in the street. The familiar intimacy of these little pictures is what will first delight him. " But it's exactly like " he will exclaim, remaining otherwise tongue-tied in his pleasure.. He sees that the artist has put on . record that _alluring, smile, of London, which self-conscious seekers after the picturesque can no more set down on paper than can the - camera. After all we are not sure whether the letterpress is not the best of the book I—one of whoge most interesting chapters is headed " Portland Stone." It is the use of this stone with its - strange effects of light and shade which makes London look . " so dramatic or—shall one say ?—theatrical." The Londoner is aware as he looks up and .down the familiar streets " of something against which his reason is fighting. It is the weathering of the Portland stone ; the appearance of great shadows where there can be no shadows, throwing hiackness up and down, and-wreathing towers with girdles of bk.lAt and cutting strange shapes on flat surfaces. Mystery hovers over the city, everything is slightly _falsified, -almost sinister,' fair is foul and foul is fair' : there is magic about. Strange-
ness is allied to beauty and that is romance. That is the final secret of Portland stone."
" I have never lost my taste for a London fog," writes Mr.
Bone, who loves his mistress in all moods, and he proceeds to string together what one might call clear recollections of London fogs in a manner to turn a smoke hater's hair grey. Let us take a paragraph at random :— -
" Only twenty years ago a man going home about midnight in a fog saw a glare of torches and a body of men passed with King Edward walking in the middle. The torches were carried by footmen and policemen ; then came the King heavily wrapped up with two of his gentlemen • then more policemen ; then some stragglers of the night, attracted by curiosity or by the chance of a safe guide to Buckingham Palace. The procession came so silently out of the fog and vanished into it agam that the. spectator later in the night was not sure that he had not imagined it. But it was King Edward who had been dining with a Court lady in Portman Square, and finding it impossible to go by carriage in the fog had decided to summon torches and a guard and walk just as a Stuart
king would have done." •
If we say that this bOok is not exactly a whole we hope we shall not be going back upon our words of grateful apprecia- tion. It ought not to be a whole. London is not a whole, and a worthy tribute to London should be what this book is---a conglomeration of delightful parts.
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