An Amazing Literary Indiscretion "Tue Avrosiocrarny or Marcor Asquin," by Margot Asquith, Messrs. Thornton Butterworth Ld., London, To the question "What induced Mrs. Asquith to write her me-moits'' no satisfactory answer has yet been given. If she wrote them for their monetary value, she has probably been thoroughly well remunerated; if because she thought she was destined to add to the world's store of knowledge, she has failed, for little in her book is really worth while. If she did it to help her husband, she has distorted ideas of her duty and her importance. No one will doubt that at one time Mrs. Asquith belonged to a very brilliant set, but whether they thank her for what she has done for them is one matter and whether her literary indiscretions would justify her membership to-day is another. Indeed her book reminds us_ of nothing so much as of a garrulous gossip with an uncomfortably long memory.
There is one ray of comfort in the whole book. In the preface shoe admits it is all her own work, and that her husband had no part in its writing. That assurance is, perhaps, unnecessary, for no man who has been Prime Minister of Great Britain and may hope to be so again can possibly be conceived to have countenanced and assisted compiling such an outstanding collection of indiscretion, _pettiness, and, it is alleged, even malice: The book is one huge blunder from a political point of view, whatever it may be from a pecuniary.
Of pettinesses, probably gratifying to a woman's mind, the following may serve as an example. After a long account of ap inter-
He may have been forced to they wound up aa follows:—At their head goes Jesus Christ. view with a stranger at a hunt, adopt this blasphemous device in order to get his poem printed at the Bolshevik press, Margot:—Good gracious! I hope I've said nothing to offend you? Do you always do this sort of thing when
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.