is I have gratefully owed to Mrs. LOWNDES the
raising of my remaining hairs like quills upon the fretful porcupine,
but the ca'-canny bogies of her present story are too perfunctory to
excuse even a shiver in any but the most unsophisticated reader.

* * *

It may, I suppose, be accounted for righteousness to Major-General Sir
ARCHIBALD ANSON that in _About Others and Myself_ (MURRAY) he is so
little of an egotist as to convey scarcely any impression of what manner
of man he is or what he thinks of this or that. Much more clear from her
quoted letters is the character of his grandmother, who vainly tried
to keep the over-gallant First Gentleman of Europe out of mischief. Our
autobiographer gives us a plain, blunt, not to say bald record of what
must have been an interesting life. He was at Eton under KEATE; a cadet
at Woolwich, where he saw a gunner receive two hundred lashes; a gunnery
subaltern in the Crimea, where he saw many queer and unedifying things;
a successful administrator in Madagascar, Mauritius and Penang, and
finally Governor of the Straits Settlements, with a K.C.M.G. and
honourable retirement to follow. But he is a man of action rather than
words, and his faculty of observation is but too often exercised upon
such slender matters as that "Poor Captain Powlett met with a misfortune
on the way to Kedah. His servant laid the dinner things on the deck
of the gunboat, then went below for something and, coming up again,
accidentally walked into the middle of the crockery and glass,
causing considerable destruction." Also, I think he quotes
his testimonials--those never very candid and always very dull
documents--much too freely. The best of the book is concerned with his
administration work in Penang and district, where on the evidence he
seems to have kept his end up with skill and no small zeal for good
government.

* * *

The title of Lady (LAURA) TROUBRIDGE'S new novel, _O Perfect Love_
(METHUEN), applies to her V. C. hero only; with his wife it is a case of
O Very Imperfect Love. _Jean Chartres_ is a common product of the age,
the sort of girl that insists on "having a good time" and "living her
life" and "being herself" (how well one knows the jargon!). Less common,
let us hope, is the woman who would desert her husband, as _Jean_ did,
because the injuries he had received in the War prevented him from
giving her the kind of life for which she craved. Foolish rat