This, too, is useful, because it frankly warns us against looking in his verse for anything which is not there. Within his self-imposed limitations, Mr. Kilmer has done good work. The amusing couplets about _Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy_ have pleased countless newspaper readers, _The Twelve-Forty-Five_ is a graphic description of the feeling produced by a late suburban train, _To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself_ is an obvious rebuke to the small-hearted versifier, and _Old Poets_ is a comfortable exposition of the philosophy of comfort. The religious poems will probably not be moving to anyone who does not share Mr. Kilmer’s creed. Mr. Kilmer’s work is glossy with a simplicity more easy-going than profound. Though he is young himself, he obviously does not sympathize with young poets, of whom he writes: There is no peace to be taken With poets who are young, For they worry about the wars to be fought And the songs that must be sung. His ideal is that of the “old poet”:— But the old man knows that he’s in his chair And that God’s on His throne in the sky. So he sits by his fire in comfort And he lets the world spin by. G. S. Hilarious Iconoclasm _Art_, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.] It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art. Comments of an Idler on Three New Books