Nothing will ever persuade me that _This Way Out_ (METHUEN) is an attractive title for a novel, however effective it may be as a notice in a railway station. The book itself, however, is intriguing in spite of its gloominess. The grandfather of _Jane_ and _John-Andrew Vaguener_ committed a most cold-blooded murder--this in a prologue. Then, when we get to the real story, we find _Jane_ tapping out popular fiction at an amazing pace, and her brother, _John-Andrew_, living on the proceeds thereof. _Jane_ is noisy, vulgar, and successful in her own line, and gets on _John-Andrew's_ nerves; and when he discovers that she has for once turned aside from tawdry fiction and written a play that is really good he decides that he can stand it and her no longer. While she was pouring out literary garbage he could just manage to endure his position, but the thought that she would be hailed as a genius while he remained an utter failure was the final stroke that turned him from a mendicant into a madman. I am not going to tell you exactly what happened, but _Jane_ found a "way out," and with her departure from this life my interest in the book evaporated. Mrs. HENRY DUDENEY has notable gifts as a descriptive writer, and my only complaint against her is that vulgar _Jane_ was not allowed to live, for in the Army or out of it she was worth a whole platoon of _John-Andrews_. The _Vagueners_, I may add, were not a little mad, but then they were Cornish, and novelists persist in treating Cornwall as if it were a delirious duchy. * * * * * I don't think I can honourably recommend Mr. HUGH ELLIOT'S volume on _Herbert Spencer_ (CONSTABLE) as light reading, though the ungodly may wax merry over the philosopher's first swear-word, at the age of thirty-six, in the matter of a tangled fishing-line, and may be kindled at the later picture of a middle-aged sportsman shinning, effectively too, after a Neapolitan who had pinched his opera-glasses. Fine human traits these in a character which will strike the normal man as bewilderingly unlike the general run of the species. The serious-flippant reader, tackling Mr. ELLIOT'S elaborate and acute analyses, may get an impression of an obstinate old apriorist, a sort of White Knight of Philosophyland, with all manner of reasoned-out "inventions" at his saddle-bow (labelled "Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," "Unknowable," "Ghost Theory," "Presentative-Representative"), which don't seem, somehow, as helpful as their inventor assumes. And 'tis certain he took tosses into many of the pits of his dangerous deductive method. I don't present this as Mr. ELLIOT'S view. He is respectful-critical, and makes perhaps the best case for his old master's claim to greatness out of the assumption that SPENCER himself, stark enemy to authority and dogmatism, would have preferred his biographer's critical examination to any mere "master's-voice" reproduction of Spencerian doctrine. I wonder if he would!