Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. E. V. Lucas may now be described without offence as institutions. We know what to expect of them, and we ask for nothing better than to go on getting the expected. They are some of the excellent people we are sure about. We should feel horribly disconcerted if, some day, we were to drop five shillings into the Lucas slot and pull out an "Eighteenth-century Vignette," or to find ourselves receiving an "England Day by Day" from Mr. Dobson's Hepplewhite cabinet. Mr. Dobson does perhaps surprise us for a moment in the present volume, which we open expecting to find a collection of papers in his well-known manner, and discover to be a commonplace book. The daintiest of commonplace books, be it understood, full of the most charming commonplaces—pages or paragraphs from or about the eighteenth century writers that Mr. Dobson loves so well. Here and there, too, snatches of verse and prose from his own pen. When the first surprise is over you are glad the book is what it is, and not what you expected. It is the book of books for the bookman's bedside. Its choice little bits are just of the right length and the right sort to compose and entertain the mind on its passage from the world of labour to the world of sleep.

What shall we consider to-night in the delightful interval between getting into bed and switching off the light? Well, let us glance at the paragraph recording how Lord Rowton asked Dizzy what he thought the most remarkable, most self-sustained and powerful sentence he knew, and was told, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Whereupon we fall to admiring that sentence and to thinking of other pregnant utterances, wondering, perhaps, what this or that person would have replied to such a question. Then sleep overtakes us, and our dreams are illuminated by sentences outshining Pascal's, which, unfortunately, we always fail to recall in the morning. Or perhaps we light upon the paragraph in which some one says that reading "Clarissa Harlowe" is like an experience—we are not quite the same after we have read it as we were before; and then we wonder what books we should pick out in our own life as experiences, as something that left us altered, a little older, perhaps even a little scared. Perhaps we recall, as a sort of parallel utterance, that excellent moment in Mr. Shaw's Major Barbara, when Undershaft consoles his Salvationist daughter for the apparent loss of a convert, saying. "Can you strike a man to the heart and leave no mark on him?" And then he explains to her the sadness she feels after her great experience—"You have learnt something; that always feels at first as if you had lost something." Now when (we ask ourselves) have we had from books this sensation of an event, of something that has left us a little weighed upon by a new experience? So we go to sleep with recollections of certain great moments, devoutly thanking all the gods that we have had these moments to recall.

Mr. Dobson naturally does not quote Mr. Shaw. Mr. Dobson "stands upon the ancient ways" and is suspicious of "iconoclasts and anarchists"; though, after all, was there ever a great original artist who wasn't a little of both? Mr. Dobson is also a little austere and aloof. Not so Mr. Lucas, whom one figures always in the opposite arm-chair, chatting to his reader with familiar and unaffected friendliness. Mr. Lucas has an unquenchable curiosity about life. Everything interests him. He is the modern Spectator; but he is always in the scene, never detached from it. He observes all our passing fads and phases, observes them without malice or censure, and communicates his views with disarming amiability. Perhaps, right inside himself, he may be grim, sardonic, saying in solitude the things he doesn't print; but outwardly he is never more than faintly ironic and humorous. His literary attitude is always that of a friend who invites us to share some entertainment he has found. The special pleasure he wishes to communicate on this present occasion is derived from a biographical dictionary compiled in the Middle East during the thirteenth century, an age and clime happily untouched by our modern English passion for aridity in our works of reference. Our way is better than the flowery personalities of Persia? Perhaps; but here we are, seven hundred years after, enjoying the human and humorous touches in Ibn Kallikan's compilation. Do you think that anyone in A.D. 2600 will be enjoying selections from the D.N.B.?

Mr. Lucas passes from his Sage of Baghdad to various diversions in the passing show of 1916, and especially to certain features of the war, upon which he touches with a delicacy and a discretion altogether his own. In fact, the volume is the now familiar Lucas blend of fun, fancy and sentiment, all in the proportions of delight and comeliness. So large is Mr. Lucas's tolerance that he even writes with enthusiasm of Pekinese spaniels. It is the only line in which I cannot follow him. For my part, I cannot like Pekineses, because I love dogs.