LITERARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 148, 24 June 1922, Page 23

LITERARY.

"My Moorland Patients," by the late Pr. H. v >' •?• Bishop (John " Murray), derorii'rs t ho life of tlip inhabitants of the Yorkshire moors in a very entertaining way. The author worked for twelve years among the people scattered o ver t b<■ moor north of Ripon, and his devotion to their welfare made him greatly beloved. He possessed a faculty for telling a pood story, and his yarns about paiienta and the quaint people he met in t!ie course of his long rounds are mellowed hv the genuine affection which he cherished towards these country folk. Mis preface to the book etates: "With en many intruders, by motor and cycle, the old kindly hospitality is rapidly vanishing. Compulsory standard education k< responsible for the disappearance of countless old words and |j:. t; nf dia'ert. Old customs and usages have been dropped. Superstition ir . . i.■u..y dead. Those uplands, so suitable for htock breeding and rearing, ere now bein" jriven over to dairying. The stock markets, which are everywhere, have limited the froqriency and hitternoM of the old Yorkshire bargaining?" , The life of a doctor under the conditions prevailing on the moors is one of great hardship. "I know only too well," Dr. Bishop writes, "what it means tn he miles away from home in the middle of the night, perhaps wet through and shivering cold, face to face with -one of thuse great events, only a tallow dip for light, and only one's groom or some handy farmer'? wife to hold the ether apparatus." Of the prevalence of thrift, to the point of miserliness, among these people. Pr. RisTiop had many evidences. "One very thrifty wife used to give her husband, a huge man, threepence for the refreshment of his big body, when he set off for the fourteen miles' task of fetching a rare load of coals, and more often than not he would return the threepence, and look for the word of praise she would always bestow. - ' The autocratic power exercised by some shrillvoice "apands" over their big husbands was a source of astonishment to the doctor. "I have =<?en a 'big six-foot-three policeman, and an ex-soldier, humbly take off his shoes at his wife's bidding and walk gingerly over the newly-swept and garnished kitchen floor, and a big gamekeeper afraid to visit his only sister because his angelic looking ba.byfaced second wife had quarrelled with her and forbade him." Dr. Bishop' describes the methods of farming, and tells many amusing stories illustrating Yorkshire wit and humour.

■\Vben all sorts of remedies for social diseases are being voiced by economists and apostles of Socialism, the statement of the case submitted by Mf. August Schvan, in his little book "Towards a Xew Social Order -, (George Allen and Unwin) will no doubt receive attention. The author contends that the economic, social, and moral evils from which mankind suffers nre entirely due to a false conception of thtf-functions of the State. Mr. Schvan's proposals for a new State are socialistip and Utopian, and his indictment of the existing form of government sweeping and doctrinaire. He declares that "the shibboleth of the nineteenth century democracy has proved the worst failure of all. Popular representation, created for the purpose of protecting the citizens from the taxgatherers of the Kings, has in turn put men into power who rob their fellow beings in a. way never attempted by His scheme for a new State depends upon a condition of thinsrs, nationally and internationally, which certainly does not exist now and is not likely to exist in the near future. Any failure of democracy would be amended if mankind generally werr the sort of perfect beings which Mr. Sc Ivan assumes they are or ought to be.

"The Keturn of Alfred," by Pairicia Brent Spinster (Herbert Jenkins), describe- what happened to the heir of a baronet travelling under the assivmed name "Smith," who was turned out ol a train late at night in a rural district of Norfolk through a strike of railway employees. After wandering aimlessly about) he approached a large house and Tan" the Hell. The butler immediately reeosnised him as "Mr. Alfred," the missin" son of the house. From that point, "Smith" found himself in for an exciting time. Not only had he inherited the friends of "Mr; Alfred." but the odium of his misdoings. Protestations were useless "He"s lost his memory, the poor lamb,- said his old nurse, and everybody clutched joyfully at this explanation". Extraordinary complications ensued, and the most impossible situations arose, because the actual Alfred was— well, not all he ought to have been. Then there was Marjorie—the worst complication of all.

"Snowdrift," by James B. Hendryx (Putnam), is a romance of the barrens— "straisht north—between the Mackenzie and the Bay." where Snowdrift, waif of the Arctic,'lndian bred, bearing a false but heavy burden of shame, and Carter Brent, Southerner, find happiness among the icy wastes. Brent, one of ths young men who won fortune at the Klondike, and lost it, in the reckless life of Dawson City, fiffhts the long fight bark to manhnod till purged by the cleansing cruelty of the Arctic.

Mr de la Mare won the first award of the* de Poiisnac prize of £100 with "The Return" in 1911. The theme is the pos?p<sion of the body of a simple modern man by the spirit of an old Fronch adventurer, a spirit that has its effect on the victim's appearance rather than on his mind. The original edition has long been out of print, and a new edition has been published by Collins and Fon: our copy from VThitcombe and Tombs. Mr. Ralph Rodd has that great (rift of a novelist-narrative skill. He can tell a story. In "Women's Way" (Collins), lie takes for his central figure a man who has just been released from prison after serving two years' hell for another man'? criirre. He comes out burning with the desire to discover the identity of the cause of this agony and be revenppd upon him, and then he finds that the "culprit was'the father of the girl hp ]nvo=. The story which develops from this tense and subtle situation i 3 told with all Mr Ralph Rodd"s practised skill.

The "National Review" for May open? a full battery of guns on Mr. Lloyd George and the Coalition Ministry. The" Duke of Northumberland, "Centurion/ , and E. P. Hewitt. K.C., supplement the editor's monthly fusillade, and Lord Eustace Percy, M.P., discourses on Foreign Policy. Of more interest to overseas readers are the articles on lawn tennis, the observance of St. Andrew's Day by Scotsmen abroad, and an account I of life on Spitzbergen. Under the head- | in? of "Government Ale," Ernest E. : Williams endeavours to show thai State control of the liquor traffic at Carlisle has been a radical failure from a ter- ! perance point of view, and has, in fact, j been attended with an increase in drunkenness. ' 1