“The Doll’s House” is at once the best and the most typical of all the stories she has written. It shows us in an unforgetable manner her complete mastery of the difficult trick of epitomizing the whole of life in a minute and almost ridiculously petty episode. All the aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. Again, in “A Cup of Tea” we have a bitter, though inoffensive, exhibition of the quality of mercy by somewhat the same whimsical concentration on little things. A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady, thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. Because the latter ventured the remark that the visitor is really quite pretty, because the great lady suddenly detects the shadow of age on her face as she passes the mirror, the visitor is forthwith despatched with a few shillings, and the great lady asks her husband that evening, “Do you think I’m pretty?” All the stories of Katherine Mansfield are more or less like that, displaying the difficult accomplishment of a worker in miniature, and, like the art of the miniature, possessing a rare and almost forgotten spirit. W. T. _The Lyric._ By JOHN DRINKWATER. (Martin Secker.) None of the “sound and fury” of modern literary theories (signifying nothing?), and little that is arresting is to be found in this essay on the lyric; its argument has a stately conservatism with enough that is fresh and new to make the whole of interest. Drinkwater pins much faith on Coleridge’s definition of poetry: “poetry--the best words in the best order”. After declaring this to be the one and only true definition, later in the text he admits that there can be no proper definition of poetry, since so much depends on the individuality of the poet. So perhaps we can forgive him the contradiction on the score that he relieves us of the necessity of having our ideals of poetry destroyed forever. The author advances an interesting theory of poetic “energies”, the forces that cause the creation of verse. He classifies these into several types that cast a new light on the whys and wherefores of poetry. The lyric itself is well defined. Perhaps the most interesting passage is his clever answer to the accusations against form made by the sponsors of free-verse. Their own lack of form, however, he treats not with diatribe, but interested tolerance. A. M. _Within These Walls._ By RUPERT HUGHES. (Harper & Bros.)