Noble Essences by Osbert Sitwell (review)

214 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY leave Russia and Russian affairs to those more qualified and less virulent than he is. LEONID I. STRAKHOVSKY Noble Essences. By OSBERT SITWELL. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited]. Pp. xll, 324. $4.50. This is the fifth and last volume of Sir Osbert's autobiography, a work which has been generally acclaimed as the most splendid of recent years. The method in this volume has been changed: instead of elaborate and continuous variations on a theme, we are given a series of character studies, intended to be particular illustrations of the period treated more broadly in the earlier books: and this change, while appropriate to the subject, seems to reduce the finale, which it was hoped would be a harmonious interweaving of all that had already been stated, to an appendix, a late ingathering of material. But Sir Osbert writes admirably and entertainingly about the friends whom he has chosen to describe. We are given, among much else, a clear vision of Lytton Strachey watching from the crowd a religious procession through the streets of Toledo--"I beheld opposite ... a figure more striking than any that had so far been exhibited ... the lean, elongated form of Lytton Strachey, hieratic, a pagod as plainly belonging as did the effigies to a creation of its own"- and longer studies of Sir Edmund Gosse, Wilfred Owen, Walter Sickert, W. H. Davies, and Arnold Bennett. Though the volume does seem detached from its forerunners, and though Sir Osbert is not so skilled a worker in miniature as, say, Sir Max Beerbohm-whose recent sketch of George Moore is in a similar style-it is delightful in itself and an important contribution to our understanding of the period. DOUGLAS GRANT BOOKS RECEIVED AMERY, J ULIAN. Th« Life of Joseph Chamberlain; IV, 1901-1903~ At the Height 0/ His Power. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited]. 1951. Pp. xvi, 533. $6.50. APPLETON, WILLlAM W. A Cycle of Cathay: The ChineSl Yogu. in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press [Toronto: Oxford University Press]' 1951. pp. xiii 182. $4.00. ...