It is probable, I think, that you will not have turned many pages of _Brenda Walks On_ (HUTCHINSON) before being struck by a certain pleasing incongruity between its matter and style. Sir FREDERICK WEDMORE is such an artist in words, so punctilious in the niceties of their employment, that to find him writing a story of modern stage-life, and using for it--with, as it were, a certain delicate deliberation--phrases peculiar to the jargon of the class of which it treats, gives one a series of small shocks. It is like hearing slang from a Dean. As a matter of fact, though, I was wrong in calling _Brenda Walks On_ a story. It is rather a disquisition about stage people, stage art and life, and anything else whatever upon which Sir FREDERICK wishes to talk at the moment, from the beauties of the North-Eastern coast (the Scarborough part of the book carried me back to the far-off days of _Renunciations_) to the treasures of Hertford House. Even _Brenda's_ chief suitor is capable of breaking off the avowal of his love to deliver a few well-chosen remarks about theatrical rents and the hazards of management. This suitor, _Penfold_, is perhaps the nearest approach to an actual character that the book contains. He was a writer of papers upon the drama of whom the author observes, "With a ready pen, indeed, Heaven forbid that he should have been cursed! It was better to have a careful one, faithfully ordered, allowing him to make sensible utterance of some part of the knowledge and thought that were in him." Which, by a happy coincidence, is exactly my verdict author's method in this graceful causerie. * * * * *