By calling her _Potterism_ (COLLINS) "a tragi-farcical tract" Miss ROSE MACAULAY disarms our criticism that she conducts too heavy a discussion from too light a platform. I don't think the author of _What Not_ is likely to write anything dull, anything I shan't be pleased to read. She has a keen eye, a candid soul, a sharp-pointed pen. She is deliciously modern. And she dislikes _Potterism_, which is sentimental lack of precision in thought. It is much more (or much less) than this, but I get the definition by inverting a phrase of her dedication. _Potter_, by the way, or _Lord Pinkerton_, as he is now, owns a series of newspapers "not so good as _The Times_ nor so bad as _The Weekly Dispatch_" (guileless piece of camouflage this!), and _Mrs. Potter_ ("_Leila Yorke_") is a novelist who might have written _The Rosary_. Two of the young _Potters, Jane_ and _Johnny_, though they both when up at Oxford joined the _Anti-Potter League_, do not thereby escape being Potterites. They cling to materialistic _Potter_ values. Whereas an aristocratic clergyman, a woman scientist, a Jew journalist (this last an admirable study) do in varying degrees contrive to avoid the deadly infection. This tract needed writing. I have a feeling that it could be better done and by ROSE MACAULAY. But it makes excellent reading as it is.... The pachyderm will wince, shake himself and be left grinning. * * * * * Mr. ARNOLD PALMER derives the title of _My Profitable Friends_ (SELWYN AND BLOUNT) from a verse, new to me, in which the poet, apparently when launching her wares, concludes, "But who has pain has songs to sell; My Profitable Friends, farewell!" which I take to be the pleasantest way in the world of calling them pot-boilers. But whether they were so intended or not, there can be no question of the very agreeable dexterity that Mr. PALMER brings to the composition of his tales. Save for a few experiments (which I should call the least successful in the collection) his formula is not the episodical "slice of life," with crumbly edges. His choice is for the well-made, with usually some ingenious little twist at the finish, and (so to speak) a neatly tied bow to end all. As an instance of this kind I commend to your notice the admirably shaped little yarn called "Two-penn'orth." Mr. PALMER has a pretty wit (perhaps here and there a trifle thin), shown nowhere to better advantage than in "A Picked Eleven," one of the most entertaining, and at the same time human, short stories that I have ever read. Further, his tales are essentially of the friendly order, and the public will be in fault if they do not also prove profitable, since we have none too many writers capable of getting such deft results with the same economy of means. * * * * *