192
NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 a. xn. SEPT. 4, 1915.
respects he owes " more practical knowledge to
him than to any other writer." As for the
criticisms of Walton's instructions in fly-fishing,
to the effect that he enjoins the fly-fisher to let
no part of his line touch the water, and so
"betrays the insufficiency of his personal acquaint-
ance with a mode of fishing upon which he would
lay an impossible condition, Mr. Marston has not
much difficulty in making short work of all that.
On other points in which Walton has been found
fault with he has also good answers, and he tells
rather amusingly of an angler who condemned
Walton's salted minnows as useless, and was pre-
sently discovered to have salted his minnows, not
for three or four days, but for as many months
with a result for which Walton's advice is cer-
tainly not to blame. Whether from his familiarity
With Walton, or from his intimate knowledge of
the sport of angling, which tends to make a
certain similarity between brothers of the rod,
and probably from both, Mr. Marston has been
able to attune his Introduction to the text of his
author with a somewhat unusual closeness and
success.
THE September Fortnightly is composed, almost without exception, of memorable articles. Two only would, in the ordinary course of things, call for comment here, as being of literary interest. One concerns a man of letters of whom most readers of the review know something Walter Bagehot, the recent publication of whose complete works gives Mr. Arthur Baumann another opportunity for penetrative and witty comment and interpreta- tion ; the other is an essay by Mr. John Cournos on Feodor Sologub, a Russian writer, whose work will probably be as new as it will certainly be pro- foundly interesting to many of them. There are three more or less anecdotic descriptions of scenes of war : Mr. Bailey's ' Some Glimpses of Russian Poland To-day'; Mr. John Pollock's The Refu- gees at Kiev ' ; and Mr. Lawrence Jerrold's ' From the French Front.' It is idle to attempt journalistic comment on such papers. They are done in a sound, workmanlike way ; and may what they tell us be burnt into our very souls ! A bril- liant article which should be uncommonly useful is that of Mr. Herbert Vivian on 'The Italian Temperament,' and equally welcome is Prof. E. H. Parker's study of the Russian character. We may mention two other papers as being of more than strictly political or military interest : that of Mr. Grahame White and Mr. Harry Harper on Zeppelin Airships, and that by Mr. Hyndman on ' The Armed Nation.'
The Nineteenth Century has but one paper describing scenes of war, but that is certainly heartrending enough for a year of numbers. It is probable that the West will never fully know the agony of Serbia. Yet it has haunted some minds, it seems, above all the rest ; and those to whom it is still all too remote may read in these terrible pages part of the reason for that. There are two delightful papers con- nected with the France of the Revolution and the First Empire : the Abbe Dimnet's appreciation of Madame de Stael, a sound piece of criticism embellished with several wise epigrams, and the conclusion of Miss Rose Bradley's charming ' The Romance of a Detenu,' concerned here with the letters of Mile, de Laclos to John Blount on his return to England, and with the light they
throw on a character of great interest and
distinction. Sir Harry H. Johnston contributes
' God and Humanity : a Symposium,' and
we are frankly at a loss to understand why
such a dialogue so commonplace in thought, so
feebly characterized, and so inconclusive should
ever have been written. Bishop Bury has an
article which we hope will be widely read, because
it may help to render less dense the still prevailing
ignorance of the true Russia ' The Grand Duchess
Elizabeth and her New Order.' It is to be valued
particularly for its anecdotes of manners.
THE September Cornhill will be found to deserve its welcome, albeit it rather drives home the mean- ing of the war than offers us relief from it. An article of extreme interest is Dr. A. E. Shipley's 'Hate,' illustrated by a remarkable photograph of a bronze mask by Prof. Tait Mackenzie, showing the expression of a competitor in a race just at the finish the purport of which is to show that hate and extreme physical effort produce almost identical expressions of face. Mr. Stephen Paget writes on ' The Meaning of the War to Children,' and, as readers of The Cornhill would naturally expect, he has alongside of some fantastical remarks a score of good and original suggestions, none the worse because here and there paradoxical. Mr. H. Warner Allen in ' Along the Fighting Line ' and Mr. Boyd Cable in his fourth essay ' Between the Lines' ('A Con vert to Conscription') are both beyond praise in the largeness and vigour and restraint of the pictures they set before our eyes. Mr. Jeffery E. Jeffery, again, in 'Some Experiences of a Prisoner of War ' has a good deal to tell, and tells it straightforwardly and effectively. Most readers will turn with eagerness to the page which holds Mr. William Watson's poem and we should be surprised to hear that it gave any one satisfaction. It might, we think, be treasured by some pedagogic student of literature as an example of radically false use of the imagination. Moreover, are not " The Plough " and " Charles's Wain " one and the same thing both synonyms of part of the Great Bear? Judge Parry draws a delightful picture of Rufus Choate, and there are two fairly good short stories.
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MR. A. S. E. ACKERMANN. " Cast not a clout till May be out." This was pretty fully discussed in 10 S. v. The correspondence was started by a suggestion that " May " might mean not the month, but the hawthorn. The evidence from the various forms of the saying goes, how- ever, against this.
