_Mr. Leo Brandish_, so Miss PEGGY WEBLING assures me, intends to write the professional biography of their mutual hero, that notable actor and admirable gentleman, _Edgar Chirrup_ (METHUEN). In the meantime she has told us all about the man himself, at least as far as the last page that he has turned, the one where the dogs and the rocking-horse are included in the family portrait, with his children and the wife whom you and I, and everyone else for that matter, realised was the one for him long before he did. Some of the other pages in his life were less satisfactory, more particularly those on which Fate had inscribed, not in the most convincing fashion (but perhaps the authoress jogged Fate's elbow), the history of his sudden unworthy infatuation. If I could not forget or ever quite understand this episode, neither could "_Chirps_" himself in the years that followed, when the lovableness and loyalty that had already won my affections were pleading for his release, with the ladies (Fate and Miss WEBLING, I mean) collaborating over his destiny. It would indeed be pitiful if any but the happiest of endings had been in store for the hero and his _Ruth_, for sweeter and simpler folk have seldom been persuaded by any writer to smile a genial public into arm-chair content. And the secret of their charm would seem to be just that they have been able to catch the qualities of sympathy and sincerity that belonged in the first case to the manner of the telling of their story; so perhaps, after all, nothing but good was meant them from the start. At any rate from first to last there is not a page in this book that is not sweet, wholesome and entirely readable. Here is tenderness without mawkishness, humour without noise, a sufficiency of action without harshness of outline; most surprising, here is a story, in which many of the characters are of the Stage, presented with an entire absence of limelight or any other vulgarity. All this, indeed, one expects from the title-page; but none the less it is no mean achievement. And so--my congratulations.
_Through the Ages Beloved_ (HUTCHINSON) might be fairly described as an unusual story. I am bound to say that I both admired and enjoyed it; but at the same time a more tangled tale it was never my task to unravel. For the benefit of future explorers I will say that the motive of the plot--whose scene is laid in Japan--is reincarnation. Consequently, though the hero, _Kanaya_, begins as a modern student who has fought through the Russo-Japanese war, you must be prepared to find him and yourself switched suddenly without any warning into the remote past. I am not quite sure that Mr. H. GRAHAME RICHARDS has been playing the game here. So unheralded is the transference that even the close and careful reader will experience some bewilderment; as, for example, when the heroine, whose own name remains the same in both ages, re-enters with different parents. As for the skipper, his doom will be confusion unmitigated. However, once you have found your bearings again, there is much to admire in the treatment of a time and a place so eminently picturesque. Mr. RICHARDS' pen-pictures of Japanese scenery have all the delicate beauty of paintings upon ivory. The clear, clean air, the colour of sunrise flushing some exquisite landscape, a flight of birds crossing a garden of azaleas--all these are realized with obvious knowledge and enthusiasm, and more than compensate for the intricacy of the plot. But this is certainly there. Once only was I myself near vanquished. This was when the _Kanaya_ of the past, himself the result of the modern _Kanaya_ hitting his head on a stone, began to hint of uneasy visions pointing to a remote Port-Arthurian future. Here I confess that (like _Alice_ and _The Red King_) I longed for some authoritative pronouncement as to who was the genuine dreamer, and who would "go out." Still, an original story, and one to be read, even if with knitting of brows.