* * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.) When the eminent in other branches of art take to literature, criticism must naturally be tempered with respect. This is much how I feel after reading Sir WILLIAM RICHMOND'S _The Silver Chain_ (PALMER AND HAYWARD). Probably, however, I should have enjoyed it more had not the publishers indulged in a wrapper-paragraph of such unbounded eulogy. If anybody is to call this novel "a work of great artistic achievement," and praise its "philosophy, psychology, delightful sense of humour, subtle analysis" and all the rest, I should prefer it to be someone less interested in the wares thus pushed. For my part I should be content to call _The Silver Chain_ by no means an uninteresting story, the work of a distinguished man, obviously an amateur in the craft of letters, who nevertheless has pleased himself (and will give pleasure to others) by working into it many pen-pictures of scenes in Egypt and Rome and Sicily, full of the glowing colour that we should expect from their artist-author. But the tale itself, the unrewarded love of the middle-aged "Philosopher" for the not specially attractive heroine _Mary_, and the subordinate very Byronic romance of _Herbert_ and _Annunziata_, quite frankly recalls those early manuscripts that most novelists must have burnt before they were quit of boyhood, or preserved to smile over. Still, in these winter days, when only Prime Ministers go to Rome (and then not to bask) and Luxor is equidistant with the moon, you may well find respite in a book so full of sunshine and memories of happy places; but I am bound to repeat my warning that your fellow-travellers will perhaps not be quite such stimulating society as the publishers would have you expect. * * * * *