BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
Ma. JOHN BUCHAN'S anthology of Scots vernacular poetry, The Northern Muse (Nelson and Sons), is sure to make a tour of the work!, partly because of the distinguished. author, and partly because there are Scotsmen in every quarter of the earth. They are sure, every one of them, to love the vernacu- lar, and to be proud of being able to pronounce it. Most of them, indeed) will also like the poems because they are in verse. The Scotsman is naturally a rhymer or a rhyme lover. We shall return to this attractive book, but the present writer cannot forbear to record his good luck in a trial cast. He happened at random upon that haunting and delightful lyric, "The Lowlands of Holland "—a ballad the rhythm of which haunts the ear with a poignant persistency. The introduction to Mr. Buchan's book tells us that his anthology was made with no other purpose than to please himself. That was the causa causans of the anthology by Miss Royde-Smith which we noticed last week. Is it the wet summer, we wonder, that has .stimulated this very attractive crop Y An anthology of a very different character is Democracy and Leadership, by Mr. Irving Babbitt (Constable), a writer whose learned and curious work, Rousseau and Romanticism, was reviewed in these columns some two years ago. Mr. Babbitt's book is, of course, not an anthology in the strict sense, but it is so full of quotations from Aristotle, Burke, Mill, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Machiavelli, Locke, Walt Whitman, and dozens of other lawyers, jurors, statesmen and philosophers, that one might almost call it an anthology. The bibliography at the end can only be described as monumental. Yet, strangely enough, it does not contain the name of the great Lord Halifax. Surely Mr. Babbitt might have got something stimulating from the great "trimmer," if only it had been his aphorism that "politics is a very coarse art."
Of Advertising and British Art, by Mr. Walter Shaw Sparrow (The Bodley Head), we will on this occasion only say that the majority of the travel and seaside posters are very attractive, and ought to draw travellers and tourists like magnets. On the other hand, there are some appalling examples of how not to advertize by poster. " Galloway " attracts in an old-fashioned way, but the palm in our opinion is carried off by the Underground Railway's advertisements. Among the best of them is the poster by Mr. Nevinson, "Lovers—To Lovers' Lanes by Motor-Bus." If the poster is as good as the miniature reproduction here, it should carry the suburbs by storm. Mr. Nevinson has our heartiest congratulations.
The June, 1924, instalment of the New English Dictionary (Oxford Press) is as attractive as ever. One could spend a holiday reading it. Most of the words that begin with " Un," hie " unpeopled " or " undone " appear in this volume, and are the cause of many fascinating quotations. An attempt to see whether we should find the memorable use of " tm- trampled " by Beaumont and Fletcher in " Bonduca " proved a failure, for the instalment ends on the word "un-
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