Even "KATHARINE TYNAN" must sometimes fall below her own standard, and _The Man from Australia_ (COLLINS), though written with considerable grace and charm, is too thin in plot to be altogether satisfactory. _John Darling_, a youngish man of wealth and an extremely liberal disposition, came from Australia to visit his connexions in the West of Ireland and--if opportunities occurred--to help them. Opportunities did offer themselves in abundance. The _Adairs_ in their various ways were ripe for a benefactor of the _Darling_ type to appear, and _John_ soon got busy. In the course of his activities--for it would have been unkind (and very dull) to bring him all the way from Australia to Ireland just to serve as a travelling relief-fund--he is made to fall in love with one of the _Adair_ girls. And that's almost the whole story. One may always trust Mrs. HINKSON to get her atmosphere right; but she is not so happy in her attempt to contrast the preternaturally unselfish _Darling_ who, like an earlier _Mr. Darling_, would have been content to live in a kennel) with the inordinately self-indulgent father of the _Adairs_. * * * * * [Illustration: EPILOGUE] THE NEW ORDER OF THINGS. "I assume," said the Cynic, "that you are sufficiently sanguine to rejoice in the prospects of Peace." "I derive a certain satisfaction from those prospects," replied Mr. Punch on a note of reserve. "But you ought to be jazzing for joy, like the other fools in their Paradise of nigger minstrelsy." "My years excuse me from choric exercises," said the Sage. "And, anyhow, it doesn't take me that way." "Then you are not in the movement. You are not in touch with the spiritual pulse of our throbbing Metropolis; you take no active part in the New Life that is springing from the seed of England's sacrifices. True, your years, as you say, are against you, however well you wear them: it is to the young that we look first for signs of the great Regeneration. And in particular we look to those who are to be the mothers of that future race which should reap the full harvest of our blood and tears. "And what do we find?" continued the Cynic. "We find a contempt for the old virtues of simplicity and reticence; we find the distinction of sex wiped out, and with it all reverence and sense of mystery. Nature is a back number with them; they must for ever be plastering their noses with powder--not just privily, as used to be the better way of faded charmers, but shamelessly in public places. In dress they barely keep within the bounds of decency prescribed by the police. They make their own advances, rounding up and capturing their 'boys' for partners, lest the haunts of jazzery should be closed against them. And in this competition for their favours the good modest fellows who only a little while ago were fighting our battles for us are now giving themselves the airs of spoilt beauties. What do you make of all this in your scheme of Renaissance?"