Mr. FORREST REID is a writer upon whose progress I have for some time kept an appreciative eye. His latest story, bearing the attractive title of _Pirates of the Spring_ (UNWIN), proves, I think, that progress to be well sustained. As you may have guessed from the name, this is a tale of adolescence; it shows Mr. REID'S North-Ireland lads differing slightly from the more familiar home-product, though less in essentials than in tricks of speech, and (since these are day-school boys, exposed to the influence of their several homes) an echo of religious conflict happily rare in the experience of English youth. Mr. REID is amongst the few novelists who can be sympathetic to boyhood without sentimentalising over it; he has admirably caught its strange mingling of pride and curiosity, of reticence and romance and jealous loyalty. The tale has no particular plot; it is a record of seeming trifles, friendships made and broken and renewed, sporadic adventures and deep-laid intrigues that lead nowhere. But you will catch in it a real air of youth, a spring-time wind blowing from the half-forgotten world in which all of us once were chartered privateers. There are, of course, worthy folk who would be simply bored by all this--which is why I do not venture to call _Pirates of the Spring_ everyone's reading; others, however, more fortunate, will find it a true and delicately observed study of an engaging theme. * * * * * I must really warn the flippant. It would be appalling if admirers of _Literary_ (and other) _Lapses_ were to send blithely to the libraries for Mr. LEACOCK'S latest and find themselves landed with _The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice_ (LANE). And yet I don't know. Here is a subject which even the flippant cannot long ignore. And a man of the world with a clear head and a mastery of clearer idiom than a professor of political economy usually commands has here said something desperately serious without a trace of dulness. I should like Professor LEACOCK'S short book to be divided into three. The first part, a trenchant analysis of some of the evils of our social and industrial system, I would send to the impossibilists and obstructives; the second, a critical examination of some of the nostrums of the progressives, should go to the hasty optimists who think that a sudden change of system will as suddenly change men, for it contains much that they will do well (and now resolutely refuse) to ponder. The third part I would return to the author for revision, for it contains no more, when analysed, than an _ipse dixit_, and quite fails to show that the evils denounced as intolerable in the first part can be remedied without some substantial portion at least of the heroic reforms denounced in his second. Also I would remind him, or rather perhaps the more ingenuous of his readers, that there have been later contributions to the theory and practice of new-world building than Mr. BELLAMY'S _Looking Backward_.