in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of lazy thinking and lazy composition. Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with. L. J. Overemphasized Purity _Love’s Legend_, by Fielding Hall. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] With a somewhat overemphasized regard for purity, Fielding Hall approaches the narration of this honeymoon trip down a Burmese river. The novel—if such a dissertation on the early marriage state could be called a novel—is told in rather peculiar fashion, by the man and woman alternately, at first, and later on with the help of two more people. The man is prone to burst forth into fairy tales to explain every point of argument to Lesbia. He tells her of a beautiful princess who was blindfolded and kept within an enclosed garden that she might never know the ways of man. “They told her that the bandage made her see more clearly than if her eyes were free. For they had painted images upon the inside of her bandage and told her they were real.” Silence. “And she believed it. Then came a Prince. He wooed the Princess and he won her. So he took her with him out of her garden. They came into the world and passed into a forest. There they were quite alone. “Take off your bandage,” said the Prince. “Look at the world and me.” “I am afraid,” she sighed; “the world is evil.” “It is God’s world,” the Prince replied. “He lives in it.” “They told me that God lived in Heaven, far off, not here,” she answered. “They told you wrong; open and you will see.” “I will not look,” she said, “I fear the devil.” “Your beauty is all cold,” he said, “your heart beats not!” “What is a heart?” she asked. “That which gives life,” he answered; “my heart beats strongly and it longs for an answer. You have a heart as strong maybe as mine. But it is sealed. Will you not let me loose it?” “I am afraid,” she answered. “Then I will tell you what he did. He held the Princess in his arms all despite herself and tore the bandage from her eyes.” ... “Did she let him do it?” “She heard his voice and all despite herself she let him do his will.” Mr. Hall voices these inanities with the appalling conceit of one who rushes in where even the best of writers tread with circumspection. And the worst of it is, that his rash feet have carried him nowhere, except, perhaps, into a limelight that is likely to prove embarrassing.