FIFTEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22337, 26 February 1938, Page 20

FIFTEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE

NEW ZEALAND VERSE

HISTORY RECONSTRUCTED

The Rose of Raby: The Life of Cec y Nevile, Duchess of York. By Guy Paget. Collins. 355 pp. (l»s 6d net.)

On a summer evening of the year 1415, a small party of horsemen .approached the noble castle of Baby which dominates the rich faim lands leader of the oarty was a very small boy who was Sr? to himself. . . The bottom nacl dropped out of the universe. . . . hl£»e hj d ad « h a°?l k a ed h ° r th C e first dify He had eaten all the things ne St h d ad y been forbidden to at home. g V ro r 4 n up e ; £a\ maT up naughty and ed £ Sea man but when he had woken up he found himself alone in the anH no one had undressed mm. Hp was ve?y frightened at the strange noises round him. He had then been verv sick and no one had paid any attenUon so he had cried and was sick Isain He had wanted his nurse and hff mununy but these men had only i a l „2d at him. This had gone on for g a weeL At first it was fun not ° r v a p dressed and washed; and until he becaml chafed, he had liked ridina and watching the people, but now he was very uncomfy all over inside and out so he cried, and his tummy ached. . From this first description of Richard Plantagenet, son of the Earl of Cambridge who had just lost his head for plotting against Henry V the reader cannot imagine the brave adventures that later follow for the hero of Mr Paget's book about Cecily Nevile, Duchess ,of York. The book is dedicated by gracious permission to Her Majesty the Queen. It deals with a very obscure period in English historyMajor Paget includes a chapter ior those who have forgotten their history"—and much of the action has been built from meagre facts and a wealth of imagination. Sir Charles Oman, in a prefatory note, has excused this by calling it "logical reconstruction and not mere hypothesis These dialogues of the dead 'have their value, when they are founded on careful studies of the characters of the actors, deduced from their recorded sayings and acts." The romantic chapters will please readers not concerned with history; and the reconstruction of events in France in the years after Agincourt and an account of the tragic history of the Maid of Orleans will interest those who have given any thought to the subjects.

Hero are Verses. South's Book Depot

48 pp,

There are too many anthologies of New Zealand verse; most of them are confusing to read, so wide is the range of subject and treatment, and most of them include a number of poems that only the utmost indulgence could admit. The latest tion, "Here Are Verses." is rather below the average; the contributors are unusually disparate, and the proportion of unduly inferior work is very large. The three or four talented writers would do better to delay publication till they could present a little volume of their own. As it is, they harm themselves by allowing respectable work to be published hugger mugger with empty or strained poems. May the day soon come when it will not be regarded as a feat worth display in New Zealand to groan or sigh or scream in lines of uneven length, or to write a dozen rhyming lines about a rata or a grass-blade! The persevering reader will enjoy and admire .the contributions of Peter Middle-

ton, Una Auld, Eve Langley, and Douglas A. Stewart. There are several curious specimens of rhythmical prose. It would be unkind to conceal from the reader "Artist and Public Speaker," which begins:

The lines of his face were the most alluringly Satanic that countenance of man could achieve. Their fly-away, furrowed divergence, upward between the aspiring eyebrows, downward through the grooved, drooping ehaps. converged in front to the fine thrusting peak of his ziose, which keened into life as the poised figure r head of a motor-car keens into the wind.