In _Lost Diaries_ (DUCKWORTH) Mr. MAURICE BARING travels by an easy road to humour, and he does not pound it with too laborious feet. This is perhaps a fortunate thing, for a farcical reconstruction of history in the light of modern sentiment and circumstances might easily tire; a Comic History of England, for instance, is stiffer reading to-day than GARDNER or GREEN. Sometimes, however, Mr. BARING seems to carry to extreme lengths his conscientious avoidance of efforts to be funny; and in the imaginary records of one or two of his subjects there is little more to laugh at than the unaided fancy of the student has long ago perceived. _Tristram_ loved two _Iseults_, and JOHN MILTON was an exasperating husband; but these things I knew, and the author of _Lost Diaries_ has made no more capital out of the situations than the eternal merriment which the bare statement of the facts inspires. But where Mr. BARING, pleasantly disdainful alike of consistency and taste, examines the pocket-book of the "Man in the Iron Mask," and finds him complaining of the noise and disturbance in dungeon after dungeon until he is removed at last to the lotus island of the Bastille; or records the blameless botanical pursuits of TIBERIUS in seclusion; or the first consumption of the Colla di Gallo by COLUMBUS in the newly discovered West, he is, for all the simplicity of his methods, amusing enough. Yet even so I am inclined to think that the first of his essays, which reads like an actual transcript from the jottings of a nineteenth-century private-school boy, is the diary which I most heartily congratulate Mr. BARING on having rediscovered, and which I should be least willing for him to lose again. * * * * *