Mr. Harold Monro is publishing a series of monthly chap-books, which has already run into three numbers; it purports to be a record of the poetry and drama of to-day. In so far as it bears upon these columns, Volume 2 is of interest as containing reproductions of Mr. Albert Rutherstone's theatre designs for Bernard Shaw's play, _Androcles and the Lion_, produced at St. James's Theatre before the war. This is altogether an admirable and valuable little book. The most recently published number is entitled _Poems Newly Decorated_, and contains some charming and effective designs by the younger artists. JOHN NASH MUSIC THE PROMENADE CONCERTS IT has been good to see the Queen's Hall filled once more with a happy crowd, after the thin and uncertain audiences which listened to the Promenade Concerts during the war. Even to a jaded professional critic there is a peculiar sense of pleasure to be derived from them which no other concerts can convey. One is free to smoke, to begin with, and free to move about and see one's friends; for that is one of the pleasant things about a Promenade Concert, that one always finds friends there. And just as one finds unexpected old friends on the floor of the house, so one finds them in the programme. There are many works from which the hardened concert-goer flees when he sees them put in to fill up time in an ordinary symphony concert. At the Promenades he may find himself listening to them in the company of someone who has never heard them before, and suddenly discover that they have taken on a new aspect in relation to all the music which memory has accumulated since the last time that he came across them. The more heterogeneous the programme, the more delightful it is, and one wonders what goes on in the minds of those listeners who crowd to the evenings that are given up to Wagner alone or to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. It is on a Wagner night that one begins to be conscious of how badly the band is playing. They are trotting through the old stock extracts, which they are supposed to know by heart. The old hands are bored to death, the new ones do not yet know their way about. At least so one is tempted to think for the moment. And on a classical night one is tempted to quarrel with some of Sir Henry Wood's interpretations.