[next page]

force this symbolism. The novel has a certain distinction, of 
course, but not such artistry as Mrs. de Selincourt brought to 
The Little French Girl. 
___________________________
Ireland, the country round about Dublin, is the setting of
Kathleen Coyle’s new novel, Shule Agra, with all the implications 
such a frame suggests: A tale of the Young Intelligentsia,—
the English title for the book is Youth in the Saddle,—centered
about the Hassan family, beginning with the death of the father
in an asylum. “I really cannot understand you young people!”
exclaimed Mrs. Hassan petulantly. “Don’t you feel anything?”
There are all the familiar episodes, but the characters are rather
finely drawn: Shule Agra, the girl; Roderick, her favorite brother,
killed by the Civic Guards; Shanad, Shule’s lover, the father of
her unborn child, from whom she flees in the end after Roddy’s
death; a man called Lewis Roncus, a friend of her brother’s, one
of the best drawn, unless it be the old grandmother who makes
the fine contrast. The style of writing is often confused, as the
country of the writer, but there is a certain quality, half poetic,
that makes for a sort of beauty.
___________________________
With Miss Warner’s “small book out nice and new,” as
Catullus put it, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, and with the memory of
Lolly Willowes, we can say further with the Latin poet that we
have “upon her trifles set some store”. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
is a fantasy of an imaginary island of the South Seas, where the
missionary efforts of the Reverend Timothy Fortune resulted in 
the conversion of but one soul, the boy Lueli. He is temporarily
converted, one may say; indeed the adjective applies to the 
Reverend Timothy as well; and the book is delightful in its whimsicality 
and delicious humor. The long, unvarying days on this
Polynesian island, like the roll of the Pacific’s swell itself, provide
the missionary with a new leisure. That and the fact that there
was but the single convert, when he had fancied that, like 
sorrows, they would come in battalions, give him special opportunity 
to work upon the education of the lovable Lueli. The