composed picture), of what that composition is specifically _about_ and where, for treatment of this interest, it undertakes to find its centre: all of which, we are willing however to grant, falls away before the large assurance and incorrigible levity with which this adventurer carries his lapses—far more of an adventurer as he is than any other of the company. The composition, as we have called it, heaven saving the mark, is simply at any and every moment “about” Mr. Wells’s general adventure; which is quite enough while it preserves, as we trust it will long continue to do, its present robust pitch. We have already noted that “Round the Corner,” Mr. Gilbert Cannan’s liveliest appeal to our attention, belongs to the order of _constatations_ pure and simple; to the degree that _as_ a document of that nature and of that rigour the book could perhaps not more completely affirm itself. When we have said that it puts on record the “tone,” the manners, the general domestic proceedings and _train de vie_ of an amiable clergyman’s family established in one of the more sordid quarters of a big black northern city of the Liverpool or Manchester complexion we have advanced as far in the way of descriptive statement as the interesting work seems to warrant. For it _is_ interesting, in spite of its leaving itself on our hands with a consistent indifference to any question of the charmed application springing from it all that places it in the forefront of its type. Again as under the effect of Mr. Bennett’s major productions our sole inference is that things, the things disclosed, _go on and on, in any given case, in spite of everything_—with Mr. Cannan’s one discernible care perhaps being for how extraordinarily much, in the particular example here before him, they were able to go on in spite of. The conception, the presentation of this enormous inauspicious amount as bearing upon the collective career of the Folyats is, we think, as near as the author comes at any point to betraying an awareness of a subject. Yet again, though so little encouraged or “backed,” a subject after a fashion makes itself, even as it has made itself in “The Old Wives’ Tale” and in “Clayhanger,” in “Sons and Lovers,” where, as we have hinted, any assistance rendered us for a view of one _most_ comfortably enjoys its absence, and in Mr. Hugh Walpole’s newest novel, where we wander scarcely less with our hand in no guiding grasp, but where the author’s good disposition, as we feel it, to provide us with what we lack if he only knew how, constitutes in itself such a pleading liberality. We seem to see him in this spirit lay again and again a flowered carpet for our steps. If we do not include Mr. Compton Mackenzie to the same extent in our generalisation it is really because we note a difference in him, a difference in favour of his care for the application. Preoccupations seem at work in “Sinister Street,” and withal in “Carnival,” the brush of which we in other