se
of humanity bruised and exiled that we get in such a story as
Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_. Mr. Graham gloriously insists upon our
recognizing our human relations, but many of them he introduces to us as
first cousins once removed rather than as brothers and sisters by the
grace of God.

He does more than this in his preface, indeed, a marvellous piece of
reality and irony which tells how a courtesan in Gibraltar fell madly in
love with a gentleman-sponger who lived on her money while he could, and
then took the first boat home with discreet heartlessness on coming into
a bequest from a far-off cousin. "Good God, a pretty sight I should have
looked...." he explained to a kindred spirit as they paced the deck of
the boat to get an appetite. "I like her well enough, but what I say is,
Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, there's the dinner bell!" Mr. Graham
has a noble courtesy, an unerring chivalry that makes him range himself
on the side of the bottom dog, a detestation of anything like
bullying--every gift of charity, indeed, except the shy genius of pity.
For lack of this last, some of his sketches, such as _Un Autre
Monsieur_, are mere anecdotes and decorations.

Possibly, it is as a romantic decorator that Mr. Graham, in his art as
opposed to his politics, would prefer to be judged. He has dredged half
the world for his themes and colours, and Spain and Paraguay and Morocco
and Scotland and London's tangled streets all provide settings for his
romantic rearrangements of life in this book. He has a taste for uncivil
scenes, as Henley had a taste for uncivil words. Even a London street
becomes a scene of this kind as he pictures it in his imagination with
huge motorbuses, like demons of violence, smashing their way through the
traffic. Or he takes us to some South American forest, where the vampire
bats suck the blood of horses during the night. Or he introduces us to a
Spanish hidalgo, "tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a nose
like a lamprey and feet like coracles." (For there is the same note of
violence, of exaggeration, in his treatment of persons as of places.)
Even in Scotland, he takes us by preference to some lost mansion
standing in grotesque contrast to the "great drabness of prosperity
which overspreads the world." He is a great scene-painter of
wildernesses and lawless places, indeed. He is a Bohemian, a lover of
adventures in wild and sunny lands, and even the men and women are apt
to become