Nancy is evidently a writer born.

"When

I am older I will write a book " is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind is filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph : "Carthage was a great city."

Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums.

At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:

"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds.”

"The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass."

"Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grapeblue darkness with a gold knife."

She speaks of waves as dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to

reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.

And

But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. yet it is evident that this brooding child needed human contact if ever mortal did. One can imagine the bewildered family cudgelling their brains as to what to do with this hypersensitive, bookish, lonely little person. School was not a success. She

set herself to hate it, and did so most successfully. And yet it did something for her. For the first time in the volume, persons, not mere shadows, walk through her pages. The head mistress, Miss Sampson, is excellently drawn. Her speech to the Sixth Form on the occasion of the row is one of the best things in the book; and later, when lecturing the school on the necessity of keeping things in their places, she breaks off to ask, "Has any one seen my fountain-pen? have mislaid it for two days," Nancy for the first time makes use of irony, just the touch

I

needed to balance her emphasis of beauty, the touch which marks the novelist.

Irony once discovered, Nancy does not spare herself. With relentless analysis, she says, "The indifference of others assured Nancy in her belief she was a poet; expression broke to lines of echoed verse and worse thought." She calls herself a child of eighteen," and such she appears really to have been. For all her critical faculty, evidenced in the chapter "The Colour of Words," she seems incapable of growing up. The book is indeed development, but the end is not on the last page, that is to come, perhaps in the next volume promised, perhaps in others not yet written.

The "echoed verse and worse thought" are published, which proves the family to have been more sympathetic than wise, and Nancy's irony plays cheerfully about the ineptitudes of reviewers. But most delightful of all is the portrait of Mrs. North, who, after turning over the leaves of the precious volume, but reading nothing, lays it aside with the confident dictum : Child, you will be a great poet." Mrs. North is a real joy as she flutters through a scene or two. Admirable the picture of her at a schoolgirl tea, where "she rushed

up

" to a group of her guests, "a plate in each hand, knelt on one knee before them, and chattered."

If Nancy's childhood was epic, the chapter "Salt Water" is lyric. Here the artist has full play, and we feel that Nancy is at last coming into her own.

The chapter on "Vers Libre" is only partly concerned with that all-absorbing topic. It is really the reaction of Nancy's first contact with the moderns, in this case the masters of modern French poetry. The criticism is often most trenchant ; it is no immature child who says of Régnier : "His prose had all the quality of poetry, was often more emotional than his verse." This is art; this she understands. But it is a child again writing of Fielding who can speak of its being " amusing to read of Amelia. Amusement is scarcely an intelligent emotion to experience before the stark and terrible tragedy of which that sad lady is the heroine.

Indeed our author, or her puppet, is a baffling and intriguing personality. As a little girl, "she was sure that if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy," and the fact that the transformation has not taken place seems to be a strange and ever-present