It is to his
credit that Mr. Weaver has perceived this, but a great deal more remains
to be said on the subject. _Mardi_, _Moby Dick_, and _Pierre_, as a matter
of fact, form a kind of tragic trinity: _Mardi_ is a tragedy of the
intellect; _Moby Dick_ a tragedy of the spirit, and _Pierre_ a tragedy of
the flesh. _Mardi_ is a tragedy of heaven, _Moby Dick_ a tragedy of hell,
and _Pierre_ a tragedy of the world we live in.

"Considering the difficulties in his path, it may be said that Mr. Weaver
has solved his problem successfully. The faults of the book, to a large
extent, as I have already pointed out, are not the faults of the author,
but the faults of conditions circumscribing his work. At any rate, it can
no longer be said that no biography exists of the most brilliant figure in
the history of our letters, the author of a book which far surpasses every
other work created by an American from _The Scarlet Letter_ to _The Golden
Bowl_. For _Moby Dick_ stands with the great classics of all times, with
the tragedies of the Greeks, with _Don Quixote_, with _Dante's Inferno_
and with Shakespeare's _Hamlet_."

=v=

A man who is certainly an authority on naval subjects tells me that _The
Grand Fleet_ by Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa is the masterpiece of the great
war. He does not mean, of course, in a literary sense; but he does most
emphatically mean in every other sense. I quote from the review by P. L.
J., of Admiral Jellicoe's second book, _The Crisis of the Naval War_. The
review appeared in that valuable Annapolis publication, the Proceedings of
the United States Naval Institute for April, 1921:

"This interesting book is the complement of his first volume, _The Grand
Fleet,1914-16_. Admiral Jellicoe, the one man who was best situated to
know, now draws aside the curtains and reveals to us the efforts made by
the Admiralty to overcome the threat made by the German submarine
campaign. The account not only deals with the origin ashore of the defence
and offence against submarines, but follows to sea the measures adopted
where their application and results are shown.

"The first chapter deals at length with the changes made in the admiralty
that the organisation might be logical and smooth working to avoid
conflict of authority, to have no necessary service neglected, to provide
the necessary corps of investigators of new devices, and above all to free
the first Sea Lord and his assistants of a mass of detail that thei