Maurois’s _Ariel_ (Shelley) is satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. I feel some of it might be better. It lacks substance, and yet it is pleasant reading enough. The book is semi-fiction; it was not meant to be yard-wide fact. But I keep the feeling of being forced to look at a water-color when I am longing for a rich, deep-pigmented oil. There is something I want and can not find. It is bad form however to look a fact too firmly in the face. What was really wrong with the lives of Shelley and Byron, and some of their delightful friends, was the influence in cold, Saxon England, with its peculiar ability to cling to a straight line and ignore the nimble necessity of corners, of the French Eighteenth Century. It made the duller English mad. They did not put on well the mental clothes of French thought and philosophy. As a race they have never been too successful in putting on any clothes. They lacked humor and a kind of emotional release in the wearing. The clothes did not fit. But they thundered ahead with desperate earnestness, and neglected the gay occasional dandying trot. British seriousness minus Gallic salt. An English woman of cultivation and good intent, in America, recently showed the same peculiarity. She started a movement to suppress Mother Goose. She insisted the book would teach children to lie, to distrust their elders. The following is one of her quoted illustrations: The little dog laughed to see such a farce And the cow jumped over the moon. The estimable, (and as it happens good looking woman), asserts truthfully, that cows have not the habit of jumping over the moon and that it is wrong to tell it to children. She writes an article on the subject. She asks intervention of the Press to back her statement that she has never seen a cow jump over the moon. No one doubted her! It did not occur to her the line is nonsense. Such writing is escape from the prison of fact. Mother Goose is art of its kind. In a subway city, of course, it is not easy to think of such exhibits—nor of anything the other side of wit. It is being witty in good form—which is the good form the polite English have overlooked. It registers by what it is not—_like English wit_. Referring again to Maurois’ book, one can not help being grateful for another glimpse of the bodily beauty of Byron, of Shelley. That delightful short story writer of Venezuela—Pedro-Emilio Coll, was influenced deeply in boyhood by the sensuous, the finished prose-technique of d’Annunzio. Who would not be, who could both read and appreciate it? Coll could not forget it. It may have helped to the commendable control he holds.