Like all romancists, he is no unqualified lover of the democracy; it is too lacking in picturesqueness, in grace and glamor to be in harmony with his temperament. He belongs in spirit to the days when heroism walked in splendor and war was glorious. He has laid it down that the “denunciation of war rests at bottom upon a gross materialism. The horrors of war are obvious enough; but it may reasonably be argued that they are not greater than the horrors of peace ... the true way in which to ennoble war is not to declare it in all its forms the work of the devil, but to emphasize the spiritual and idealist element which it contains. It is a kind of national sacrament, a grave matter into which no one can enter lightly and for which all are responsible, more especially in these days when wars are not the creation of princes and statesmen but of peoples. War, on such a view, can only be banished from the world by debasing human nature.” That is the purely romantic vision. Since 1914, Buchan’s experiences of War and the horrors of peace that result from it may have modified his earlier opinions. Anyhow, it is a wonderful theme for romance when it is far enough away. It shows at its best in such chivalrous tales of adventure and self-sacrifice as have gathered round the gallant figure of the Young Pretender. You know from his books that John Buchan is steeped in the lore of the Jacobites and sensitive to the spell of “old songs and lost romances.” Dedicating “The Watcher by the Threshold” to Stair Agnew Gillon, he says, “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passengers but easy for the maker of stories.” One owns to a wish that the author of “John Barnet of Barns” would now set his genius free from the squabble and squalor of present-day politics (by the way, he once put up for Parliament but fortunately did not get in) and write that great story of the ’45 which he hints elsewhere has never yet been written. DONN BYRNE [Illustration: DONN BYRNE] There are more gods than any man is aware of, and there is really more virtue in discovering a new one, and catching him young, than in deferring your tribute until he is old and so old-established that all the world has recognized him for what he is. You may say that Donn Byrne is not a god of modern Grub Street, but you can take it from me that he is going to be. He has all the necessary attributes and is climbing to his due place in the hierarchy so rapidly that he will have arrived there soon after you are reading what I have to say about him.