Remaining Books

324 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY 7. Remaining Books THE EDITOR Two memorial volumes will be mentioned first. W. E. Saunders, Naturalist has been produced by the Federation of Ontario Naturalists in. honour of one of their number-a man who was, incidentally, a member of a distinguished Western Ontario family; his · brother Sir Charles Saunders, was the developer of Marquis wheat. This brief book consists of appreciative essays by some of Mr. Saunders' friends, a bibliography of his nut:nerous publications, and a few samples of the weekly articles on his hobby which he contributed to the London Free Press from 1929 until his death in 1943. The naive outsider, who has always thought of naturalists as gentle souls, may be surprised by Mr. Saunders' .enthusiasm for "col~ Jecting" rare birds with his gun and by his habit of casually producing a victim from his pocket at any odd moment, for example. during a train journey, and proceeding to skin it. But then another gentle naturalist, Izaak Walton, said: "I am not of a cruel nature; I love to kill nothing but fish." This for Remembrance, the other memorial volume, is of a different kind. Carlyle Allison, Editor of the Winnipeg Tribune, has brought together twenty-five brief essays by his father, the late W. T~ Allison, who was Professor of English in the University of ·Manitoba and Literary Editor of the Tribune for more than twenty years. He had also followed an earlier profession: before.. he was a university teacher and a literary journalist he had been a Presbyterian minister. The signs of all three are to be found in these essays, for they are the direct and modest expressions of a man and his interests. The writer of the two pages about "Shadows on the Back Shed/' for example, is first the newspaper columnist, at his ease with his readers, chatting about the colour of the shadows "on our back shed, late the other afternoon,; but soon the academic has turned the subject from painting to literature with appropriate quotations from. Stevenson and Burke, and Shakespeare's "Life's but a walking shadow/' after which it is not surprising that the former minister should call to mind and quote some shadow-passages in the Psalms, Isaiah, and the Song of Solomon. This is a book that will be particularly valued by all those who knew Professor Allison. Robertson Davies, in The Table Talk of Samuel MarchbanksJ is also the journalist at his ease, writing about himself and any other subject that niay entertain his readers. In spite of the title, the arbitrary division into sections corresponding to the courses of a dinner, and some reference to fellow-guests, the book (it need hardly be argued) does not read like table talk: it might have been made ·up from several years' accumulation of daily half-columns by a journalist writing about this and that: a recent movie LETTERS IN ·CANADA: 1949 325 or play, the drama festival, Toronto vs. Montreal, "Of Short Skirts,'' "Of Ontario's Bacchic Refinement," "Of His Illiteracy," or "The Horrors of Gracious Living." Samuel Marchbanks is a·man of the world and a jester living among thick-skulled Ontario philistines; he talks entertainingly, often wittily, to fill 250 pages on as many subjects. Probably he talks to keep himself company: there is never anyone else at that table except silent stuffed shirts and puzzled frumps. Perhaps The Table Talk is not quite up to the mark of the admirable Diary of Samuel Marchbanks of several years ago, but it is still a book for which we may be grateful: lively and humorous comment on our Canadian mores is a rare and valuable commodity. Of The County Kerchief by Louis Blake Duff, I would only say that it is a two-hundred-page compilation (from literature, history, and the newspapers) of accounts of death by hanging-and I did not find the subject andthe author's coy treatment of it anywhere near as fascinating as he apparently did. CHECK-LIST OF TITLES ALLISON (W. T.), This for remembrance (Toronto, Ryerson, x, 50 pp., $2.00). BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SociETY OF CANADA~ Richard Cockrel, Thoughts on the education...