Mr, G. K, Chesterton is said to be series of intimate biographic of historical characters. Savonarola, William Cobbett, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Napoleon Bonaparte are among the titles.
We are to havea new history of the University of Oxford, and it wil, in some ways, be fuller than anything which has gone before it. The writer is Sir Charles Filward Mallet of Balliol Colles, who has long been preparing his material. Ife has had access to manuscripts treasured in the University archives and to pri ed material which has searcely been drawn upon. There will be three volumes of the history, and Methuen hopes to publish two of them in the autumn, Mr, Arnold Bennett, as has been mentioned here, is to give us another story of "Riceyman Steps." Since he wrote the volume so entitled, the corner of Clerkenwell with which deals has become almost a place of pilgrimage. His new story is sure to bring other pilgrims, but it is not 4 full novel, and so it will appear in volume with other stories. The maid of all work was a lovable Sgure in "Riceyman Steps," and Mr. Bennett continues her history in happier surroundings.
We have from" time to time had glimpses of what life is in the French Foreign Legion, which includes men of all nations. There will be a fuller glimpse in a' personal book entitled "Memoirs of the Foreign Legion," which Mfr. Martin Secker announces. It has been edited by Mr. D. H. Lawrence the novelist, and we are told that the author himself took his life in Malta in the autumn 10920, His passport showed him to be an American citizen, but, by cir cumstances and temperament, he probably belonged to the band of cosmopolitan wanderers who are to be found in every large European city.
Mr. Seymour Hicks is known to his friends "as a story-teller and as a gatherer of good stories. We shall have a bunch of them in a book which he has prepared and to which he has given the title, "Chestnuts Re-Roasted." The book is something more than a collection of humerous stories and brilliant repartee, for Mr. Hicks writes with a personal touch of romance concerning many of the greatest wits that have moved in London life. He knew Sir William Gilbert, Charles Brookfield, Frederick Burnand, Sir Herbert Tree and many another worthy man. He expects that most of his readers will find some of their own chestnuts in his pages, but they will also find others which they have missed.
In one of Ate! b. B. W. Lewis's amusing articles recently there was an imaginary letter from a London theatrical manager with a Jewish name, declining with thanks a play] called "Love's Labour's Lost," submitted by William Shakespeare. In 4 more serious mood Mr. St. John Ervine, in "The Organized Theatre" (Allen and Unwin, 7s. 6d.), pictures the dramatist setting out from Stratford today with the INS. of "Ham let" in his pocket, and being thrown out of the London theatres by unappreciative managers. If Mx. Ervine seems unduly pessimist about the theatre and the public taste he at any rate does so: cthing more than merely abuse the present state of things. He puts forward prac-teal proposals which may make things easier for a young Shak peace "coming up to one of the universities with the seeds of immoxtality in his head'
Years ago Joseph Pulitzer, the! proprietor of the "New York World,? used to go to Europe in his sroreots yacht. He was accompanied by five secretaries, whom he constantly kept busy, for he was a man, even when he became blind, of immense energy, as we shall discover in a life of him which Mr. Don C. Seitz has written.
It opens dramatically, for it does so with Pulitzer, then a lad of 18, jumping from a European sailing ship} into Boston Harbour, in order to avoid the red tape which might have kept him out of America as an undesirable immigrant.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.