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awn not to the individual items, but to the balance of the whole. That is the test of a list. But there is a good balance, a balance of power, and a balance of mere weight or prestige. It is the power we are after here. Regard for a moment the way 'Tom Cringle' balances Dana's laconic record of facts. No power on earth could hold 'Tom Cringle' to facts, with the result that his story is more truly a representation of sea life in the old navy than a ton of statistics. He has the seaman's mind, which Dana had not. "Then again 'Captains Courageous' and 'The Flying Cloud' balance each other with temperamental exactitude. Each is a fine account of sea-doings with a touch of fiction to keep the sailor reading, neither of them in the very highest class. 'The Cruise of the Cachalot' is balanced by the 'Log of a Sea Waif,' each in Bullen's happier and less evangelical vein. I was obliged to exclude 'With Christ at Sea,' not because it is religious, but because it does not balance. It would give the whole list a most pronounced 'list,' if you will pardon the unpardonable.... I regret this because 'With Christ at Sea' has some things in it which transcend anything else Bullen ever wrote. "Now we come to a couple of books possibly requiring a little explanation. 'The Salving of a Derelict' is a remarkably able story of a man's reclamation. I believe Maurice Drake won a publisher's prize with it as a first novel some years ago. It was a winner among the apprentices, I remember. 'The Grain Carriers' is a grim story of greedy owners and an unseaworthy ship by an ex-master mariner whose 'Chains,' while not a sea story, is tinged with the glamour of South American shipping, and is obviously a work written under the influence of Joseph Conrad. 'Marooned' and 'Typhoon' balance (only you mustn't be too critical) as examples of the old and new methods of telling a sea story. "'The Sea Surgeon' is one of a collection of stories about the Pescarese, which D'Annunzio wrote years ago. They are utterly unlike 'II Fuoco' and the other absurd tales on which translators waste their time. In passing one is permitted to complain of the persistent ill-fortune Italian novelists suffer at the hands of their English translators. "Assuming, however
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