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Small Talk at Wreyland. By Cecil Torr. Second Series. Cambridge: The University Press. 1921. Price 9s. net,
This is a very interesting collection of notes on various subjects by a country gentleman interested in his district and the people, and at the same time a learned scholar. He does not seem to have devoted much attention to folk-lore, but he tells how a woman said she had seen the Devil, when it was only the Rural Dean, dressed in black and mounted on a big black horse, who suddenly appeared on a foggy day. A man told the writer how he had been treated, as a child, for whooping-cough by being laid in a sheep's forme — the imprint that a sheep makes by lying in one place all night ; when the sheep gets up in the morning a sort of vapour rises from the warm ground into the cold morning air. The book would be quite delightful if it paid more attention to subjects in which we are specially interested.
Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History. By Lilian Winstanley. Cambridge University Press. 1922. Price 15s. net.
Miss Winstanley in this volume continues her study of the relations between Shakespeare's plays and the history of his time, which she began with a similar treatment of Hamlet. She suggests that as the stage in Elizabethan times took the place of the newspaper and the platform, it took account of popular events of the day. But as it was hampered by a strict censor- ship, it was necessary to adopt what she terms " symbolic mythology." She finds the basis of Macbeth and King Lear to be the similarity which men of his time saw between the Gun- powder Plot and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, with the murder of Darnley. She makes out, on the whole, a good case, and she has worked out these comparisons with great ingenuity and abundant learning. Her conclusions deserve careful con- sideration in dealing with the general subject of mythology.
