ny stroke,--as, for instance, a bridge and a roquet,--the one or the
other could be waived. The croquet, too, could always be waived. But to
assert boldly that "a player may decline any point made by himself, and
play precisely as if the point had not been made," is a thought radical
enough to send a shudder along Pennsylvania Avenue. Under this ruling, a
single player in a game of eight might spend a half-hour in running and
rerunning a single bridge, with dog-in-the-mangerish pertinacity,
waiting his opportunity to claim the most mischievous run as the valid
one. It would produce endless misunderstandings and errors of memory.
The only vexed case which it would help to decide is that in which a
ball, in running the very last bridge, strikes another ball, and is yet
forbidden to croquet, because it must continue its play from the
starting-point. But even this would be better settled in almost any
other way; and indeed this whole rule as to a return to the "spot" seems
a rather arbitrary and meaningless thing.

The same adherence to theory takes the author quite beyond our depth, if
not beyond his own, in another place. He says that a ball may hit
another ball twice or more, during the same tour, between two steps on
the round, and move it each time by concussion,--"but only one (not
necessarily the first) contact is a valid roquet." (p. 34.) But how can
a player obtain the right to make a second contact, under such
circumstances, unless indeed the first was part of a _ricochet_, and was
waived as such? And if the case intended was merely that of ricochet, it
should have been more distinctly stated, for the right to waive ricochet
was long since recognized by Reid (p. 40), though Routledge prohibits,
and Fellow limits it.

Thus even the errors of "Newport" are of grave and weighty nature, such
as statesmen and mathematicians may, without loss of dignity, commit. Is
it that it is possible to go too deep into all sciences, even croquet?
But how delightful to have at last a treatise which errs on that side,
when its predecessors, like popular commentators on the Bible, have
carefully avoided all the hard points, and only cleared up the easy
ones!

_Poetry, Lyrical, Narrative, and Satirical, of the Civil War._ Selected
and Edited by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. New York: The American News Company.

We confess that our heart had at times misgiven us concerning the
written and printed poetry of our recent war; but until Mr. Whit