d nervy a person to fit my ideal of a paternal
landlord, and what is, after all, more important, I feel convinced that his
tenants and stable-lads would have thought the same. Secondly, I refuse to
believe that a spinster, however soured, however much devoted to the cause
of Labour and misguided crusades for social purity, would have behaved as
_Miss Baker_ does in this book; and deliberately attempted to father a
false scandal on _Sir Robert_ merely because she hated his type. And if the
author replies that he knows of such an instance I maintain that it was
just one of those things which the art of selection should have prompted
him to leave out. I have, of course, no fault to find with Mr. DICKINSON'S
style, which as usual is curiously simple yet at the same time attractive,
nor with his powers of character-sketching. His schoolboy of seventeen,
_Eddie Durwold_, is in this book particularly good. It is the things that
these people do that bothers me. And if I might venture to rename _The
Business of a Gentleman_ the title I should choose is "The Escapade of an
Egoist."

* * * * *

Mr. SIDNEY LOW has paid some visits to Egypt and the Sudan, has kept his
eyes very wide open and has written _Egypt in Transition_ (SMITH, ELDER) in
consequence. The Earl of CROMER, who has also been there or thereabouts,
introduces the book to the notice of the public with an appreciative
preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can
claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having
above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the
clearest possible picture of the country--a stretch of sand, some pyramids
in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling
enigmatically--not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave
Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his
illustrations reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less
personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining five for
the vastly interesting facts, political, international, social and racial,
with which he entertained me. It requires no small skill in a dispenser of
such facts to make them entertaining. Twice only was I minded to quarrel
with him; once when he expressed a general contempt, based upon one
egregious example, for the foreign exports of Oxford and Cambridge, and
again when he got on to the subject of touri