Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard has published in book form his “Year of Country Days” under the general title of _Homeland_. The series has appeared in the _Daily Mail_, where it appears to have given pleasure to a considerable number of readers. I do not doubt the fact. Even the least suggestion of Nature would be a relief in the stuffy and bawling atmosphere of the _Daily Mail_. But in the form of a book, in which three hundred and sixty-five of them appear, they are almost intolerable. Their value lay in their contrast to the surrounding columns of the journal in which they were published. Take away that background and let them stand by themselves, and they are seen to be what they are—pale, anæmic, and not very knowledgeable commonplace observations. Nothing really exciting appears to have happened in the country under Mr. Izzard’s observation. When reading Jefferies or Hudson or Ward Fowler or Selous, you are made to feel, in a simple walk along a hedgerow, that something dramatic is afoot. Discovery is in the air. But Mr. Izzard is never fortunate, and all he has to record are the commonplaces of the country-side, which I could as easily reconstruct from a calendar as gather from his text. “The silver clouds are heaped together in billowy masses that sail with deeps of Italian blue between.” How pretty! But the delight is wanting. S.S.S.—The Simplified Spelling Society has broken loose from obscurity again in the issue of a new pamphlet, called _Breaking the Spell; an Appeal to Common Sense_. A preface contributed by Dr. Macan rehearses all the old “reasons” for simplifying our spelling with as little attention as ever to the real reasons against it. “Spelling,” we are told, “should be the simplest of all arts.” It is so in Spanish, in Italian, in Welsh, and in Dutch, and it was so in Greek and Latin. Why not, therefore, in English? The reasoning, however, is ridiculous, for it assumes that it was by some deliberate and self-conscious design that these languages came to be spelled phonetically, and hence that we have only to follow them faithfully (and the advice of the S.S.S.) in order to place our language in a similar state. Language, however, is not a product of logic and science, but of art and taste. It is determined not by reason alone, but by the totality of our judgment, in which many other factors than reason are included. To ask us to “reform” our spelling in order to make it “reasonable” is to ask us to forgo the satisfaction of every intellectual taste save that of logic; a procedure that would not only “reform” our spelling, but all literature into the bargain. It is pretended that the adoption of simplified spelling would have, at worst, only a passing effect upon the well-being of literature. If, for example, all the English classics were re-spelled in conformity with phonetic rules, and their use made general, very soon, we are told, we should forget their original idiosyncrasies, and love them in their new