For an old hand BENJAMIN SWIFT shows a poor discretion in crowding too many characters into his pages to allow of anything like adequate characterisation, and indeed, in _What Lies Beneath_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL), he is too much concerned with his main purpose of tract-making to be sufficiently interested in the subsidiary business of good story-telling. A _Mr. Ravendale_, an unpleasant, hoary-bearded patriarch and opulent seller of Bibles, who has buried three wives and lives in a fat Bloomsbury house with the collected offspring of his three marriages, and one or two step-children thrown in, is haunted by a doubt as to whether the beautiful _Ruby Delmore_, daughter of the widow _Delmore_, his second wife, is also the daughter of the late _Mr. Delmore_ or of himself, whose attitude towards _Mrs. Delmore_ had not been as correct as that of a seller of Bibles is reasonably expected to be, especially by people like the author who don't believe in Bibles. At any rate _Sebastian_, son by the first marriage, is desperately in love with _Ruby_--so, you see, the old man had something to worry about. However, it all turns out to be, in fact, mere illusion, developing into a fatal monomania, and the family business is left to be carried on by such of the next generation as have not been convinced by the formidable array of evidence, anti-Theistic and anti- Christian, of two of the characters (who, it is clear, have sedulously read the same books). _Sebastian_ loses his faith apparently because he has been distressed by the sight of a wounded horse in the great War, as if it were necessary to wait for the great War for this kind of a difficulty! A certain rough earnestness lies beneath this rather crude presentment of a world-old problem. But I wonder how much of the honest patriotism which fills the book would survive a rationalism as perverse and shallow as Mr. SWIFT applies to traditional faiths. Does he imagine they have no better defences than those which he puts into the weak mouth of silly _Mr. Teanby_, the parson? * * * * *