an her pretty head. Anyway _Tony_, who needed no
encouragement, wrote his opera and landed a ten-thousand dollar prize
for same, together with the daughter of the millionaire, who began to
see, no doubt, that there might be something in poetry after all.

* * * * *

_Indian Studies_ (HUTCHINSON) one may call a work partly descriptive
and historical, partly also polemic. Its author, General Sir O'MOORE
CARAGH, V.C. (and so many other letters of honour that there is hardly
room for them on the title page), writes with the powerful authority
of forty years' Indian service, five of them as Commander-in-Chief.
His book is, in compressed form, a survey of the Indian Empire that
deserves the epithet "exhaustive"; history, races, religious castes
and forms of local government are all intimately surveyed; the
chapters on the India Office and (especially) the army in India will
command wide attention both among experts and the general public.
Naturally the word "experts" brings me to the controversial side of
the subject, the much discussed Montagu-Chelmsford Report, concerning
which the late C.-in-C. holds views that might fairly be described
as pronounced. Where authorities differ the honest reviewer can but
record impartially. Really we have here the old antagonism between the
upholder of one school of Imperial thought, fortified by many years'
experience of it's successful application, and the theories of a
newer and more experimental age. Without attempting a judgment on its
conclusions, I can safely agree with the publishers that this is a
book that "will be read with special interest in military, diplomatic
and Government circles"; also--my own postscript--more vociferously
debated in certain club smoking-rooms than almost any volume of recent
years.

* * * * *

A "Literary Note" thoughtfully inserted in the fly-leaves of _The
Elstones_ (HUTCHINSON) informs me that it will "make a strong appeal
to all those who have experienced the suffering caused by religious
conflict." It is not entirely because it has been my lot to escape the
ordeal in question that Miss ISABEL C. CLARKE'S latest book failed
to make the promised appeal. She takes two hundred and odd pages
of peculiarly eye-racking type to convert the _Elstone_ family to
Catholicism without indicating in any way how or why her solemn
puppets are inspired to change their beliefs. Now and again a
complete