"There is a teacup storm in the Close, I hear. The Dean altered the time of closing the Minster for summer cleaning or some such trifle, and did not consult the Chapter, which had already made its holiday arrangements." This sentence, chosen at random from _Quisquiliae_, the diary of _Henry Savile_, will do well enough to support my contention that _Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours_ (MURRAY) is going to be a great boon to the cathedral cities of our Midland shires. Under the form of a narrative of social life in Sunningwell, Dr. WARRE CORNISH has elected to arrange his views on religion, art, literature, politics and the questions of the day, sometimes putting them into the mouths of his characters and sometimes into the note-book of the afore-mentioned _Henry Savile_, a leisured cripple whose disquisitions on letters and on people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. _Mr. Henry Savile_ quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely for the taste of a decadent age, and his friends, _Dr. Ashford, Lady Grace_, the bishop's wife, _Olive_, her niece, and _Philip Daly_, nephew of an archdeacon and parliamentary candidate for Sunningwell, would be a little more amusing if they were treated in a more Trollopian manner, and did not so faithfully discuss the burning controversies of the time. But, after all, the great excitement in _Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours_ (and I really cannot advise any resident in--shall we say Mercia?--to be without it) is the chance it affords for such questions as: Who is the Dean? Does the author really mean Canon X? Are we living in Sunningwell, or is it L----? Even I myself, in this metropolitan backwater, have made one or two ingenious guesses, but wild taxicabs would not drag them from me. * * * * *