New Hues in the "Almanach De Gotha"
The "Almanach de Gotha," which has ceased to appear in the German edition, is now on sale in its French form for 1924. "There is something particularly melancholy for the German aristocracy in the present "Gotha." If proper pride refuses to see anything in the inclusion of the reigning families of "Ethiopia and Asia but a lamentable anxiety on the part of] the publishers to find new custom-cers to replace the old, it is very annoying for German ' ladies noble birth to find these newly included royalties so very casual about dates. Neither looks. nor cosmetics availed anything in circles where the "Almanach betrayed the year of one's. birth with merciless exactness; the! plentiful rows of asterisks that mark the family chronicle of the present rulers of Egypt would never hav days before the revolution.
The shyness some of these black and brown monarchs about rev their legitimate emulated by one or two of the lesser houses of Germany. One of the nian Heinrichs of Reuss has not given the name of his present princess, and the address of the pair in Berlin is in a very second-rate suburban neighbourhood. The brutal frankness with "which divorces plentifully sprinkle the Pages hax been echoed in cases exotic climes, the simple of so many crowned into a detailed pore de la mueces-
Of the new arrivals, Ras Tata, poor as to other details, is the only. Pertonage whose children are catalogued as a, b, ¢, and d. Casualness as to the number, birthplace, and age of children is, in fact, the chief "characteristic of the "new "Gotha," which one may imagine from henceforward adorning the doudoirs of dusky queens and forming the subject of bitter envy: in up-to-date what strikes one as, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of all is the compression of the Romanow holocaust into one line of general introduction to the family. Comparing the relative destinies of the deposed reigning houses of Central Europe, one generalization is possible even as regards 30 vast a page of history this small red volume compresses. In some families divorce has proved the natural outlet for one member after member in their altered attitude towards the world; in others the convent and the monastery have claimed a corres Ponding number—"The Observer."
A remark made about Mtr. that he was the least "books of the novelists is t in one sense, but. not, of course, in that of his not. being widely read. He had, in fact, talent that belongs to genius of getting to know" whatever was being done in his own art of writing,—and what interested him most in that was anything new in method. In earlier days, when he was reading:
our literature for knowledge, he had great' prescience in "spotting" the best sources; as, for example, when for the proper "feel" of a particular English society he made a close study of the works of Whyte Melville. He could not, of course, have made a better choice.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.