and boys alike, and revenged himself directly he had left by trying to make our flesh creep. In this experiment on the flesh of people little acquainted with boys or public schools, he has probably succeeded. One would suppose that his book may have done a measurable amount of damage to Fernhurst.' Another possible supposition is that he may have been petted and spoiled by some peculiarly injudicious schoolmaster of a journalistic type of mind, whose nerves (and much must be forgiven to such a man in the terrible nerve-wracking year 1917) were intolerably on edge, and who found himself hopelessly out of sympathy with his healthy surroundings. We do not ask, and we do not seek to know, what actual school should answer to the name of 'Fernhurst' in 'the dreamy Derbyshire town' with ‘a great grey abbey' (we do not somehow think of Derbyshire as a dreamy' sort of county). Nor do we suppose that Mr Waugh has been a frequent visitor at his old school since his departure. But we do rather wonder whether the Governors took any steps towards an action for libel against him.

Mr. Leslie's book about Eton is a more difficult proposition to tackle. If 'Fernhurst' may be relegated to that Machiavellian limbo of many imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known in actual existence,' it is otherwise with Eton, concerning which too many books, and too much literature of every kind, from Dr Keate's time to our own, have been written. Masters as well as boys write there, and often with too little reticence. The result has been to throw too fierce a light upon this school. The excuse, if it be one, is that the old-Etonian public is a large one and a book-buying one, and no literary man can be wholly indifferent to the rewards of divination. Books about Eton are, moreover, eagerly read, even by those who were not educated there, and the rather difficult and peculiar terminology of the school is not wholly unfamiliar to the outside world. All this makes it rather difficult for an outside reviewer to estimate the value of a book about Eton. Mr Leslie does not pretend that his is about anything else; he lays no claim to any general appreciation of boyhood. That he is a brilliant and descriptive writer, with occasional flashes Vol. 245.-No. 485.

of real cleverness and originality, cannot disguise the fact that he is a cock of the same hackle as Mr Waugh, that he has the same end in view, that of startling and shocking his readers (particularly his readers from other schools, real Eton schoolboys and masters, except those whom he has deliberately wounded, will take him at his real value), careless of what damage he may do to his old school, of what wounds he may inflict on his victims. In this last matter, and without Mr Waugh's excuses of extreme youth and extreme rancour, he is a thousand times more guilty than Mr Waugh, as he is a thousand times more clever. For we have been told, on good Etonian authority, that the names of all the masters in 'The Oppidan' are but thinly disguised, that the portraits of some are deliberately drawn in puckish, if not in more serious, malice; and that the names and nicknames of the boyish actors in the story, many of whom lost their lives in the War, are hardly changed at all, and that their escapades, some of them discreditable, and exploits, are related almost as they happened. We cannot wholly believe this last indictment, for the cruelty of such descriptions, at this near date, would be too cold-blooded, the probability of a horse-whipping from their surviving friends too great a risk for the writer to run. But there must be some truth in it, for the description of the fire and the loss of life in the last chapter is taken from an actual occurrence at the school at the opening of the present century. To have introduced this incident into a rollicking novel at a period when the parents and friends of the sufferers are still probably living, is an example of bad taste almost incredibly flagrant even for an irresponsible Irishman or a yellow-press journalist. Mr Leslie (no doubt after finishing his novel) has sought to disarm his critics and conciliate his readers by an ingenious, if somewhat colourless, preface, which certainly does not prepare them for the shocks to their good taste which he administers in the text of the book. Now, in this preface he says (and no doubt he believes) that 'there could be nothing duller than a school novel true to life.'

As we read these words we pondered, and we wondered, whether they must necessarily be true. And

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even while we pondered we came across another book about Eton of the same date of publication (1922) as Mr Leslie's, but containing memories of the school of some fifteen, or more, years before the period to which 'The Oppidan' evidently refers. This is 'Playing Fields' by Mr Eric Parker, whose debut in story writing was made in 1901 with 'The Sinner and the Problem'—a title which may have been adopted ad captandum, but which is entirely belied by the charming, if slight, study of the personality of two boys who are its main heroes. Mr Parker has also written a serious study of his old school called 'Eton in the 'Eighties,' which is a good deal better than most studies of its kind, but would not, of itself, call for any very high praise. And he is known to a select circle of readers as a prose-poet of his own beautiful county, Surrey, and a keen student of natural history of equal knowledge with, and more literary gift than, the late C. J. Cornish. But 'Playing Fields' is on a level far above anything he has yet done, and far above anything that any modern has done in the same field. If we were to take seriously the words we have just quoted from Mr Leslie's preface to 'The Oppidan,' we suppose that he, Mr Leslie, would say that 'Playing Fields' was 'not a novel.' And, in truth, it is more a study of boy life and boy nature under exceptionally happy circumstances. Yet it is woínois, or, if you prefer it, a fictitious narrative, with a regular 'hero' and all the normal appendages of a 'story'; it is, as 'Tom Brown' was, and as Mr Leslie would like us to believe 'The Oppidan' was, based upon facts and illustrated by characters, or, rather, by unconscious generalisation from characters, actually observed or remembered by the author. Mr Leslie has many stirring scenes ("The Great Keyhole Mystery' is about the best) and some jolly fellows as actors in them, yet you cannot help seeing that he is out,' as modern slang has it, for a purpose quite different from the description of ordinary schoolboy life. He is out to exercise his wit and his satire against everything that is sober and quiet at Eton, against all the old ideals of Dr Warre's time, against Government, against tradition, against the Empire. And, alas, most of all, he is out to display his own cleverness.

Mr Parker's book book is at once Dichtung and Wahrheit. It does not conceal the fact that there are sordid aspects of school life; it lets you guess pretty clearly what they are, but it does not trumpet them to the skies, and in treating of them by conversations the author employs just that natural habit of shy talk, half-confidences, broken-off sentences, that are the protective armour of the normal schoolboy. He exaggerates nothing nor aught sets down in malice. Like the author of 'Tom Brown' he fills his pages with things that have seemed to him in his middle life to have been the essentials in his own boyish days. And he is eminently fitted for this, for it is clear that on his sensitive brain the real thoughts and scenes of childhood and boyhood have been indelibly imprinted. It has been said of 'Playing Fields' that only a mother of sons could perfectly appreciate it, and it was, indeed, pointed out to the present reviewer by one such mother that the chapters on home and private school life were, if possible, even more true to nature than those on Eton life. We should not expect Mr Leslie, even in his præfatial mood, to endorse this verdict. But the lines which we have placed at the head of this article were written after reading and rereading 'Playing Fields' by a true poet and a great schoolmaster whose knowledge of boys is not inferior to Mr Parker's own. Perhaps, after all, the best category in which to class the book is that of love-poems; for it is at once a love-poem to Eton and a love-poem to boyhood's days.

The latter is infinitely the greater achievement of the two. 'Playing Fields' shares with Tom Brown' the supreme merit of being a true picture, mutatis mutandis, of any great school in Britain at any time during the past hundred years. If it had been called 'Meads,' and if the necessary reconstructions of the background had been made, its characters and their dialogues would have appealed equally to the Collegemen of Eton's elder sister. It is, however, greater than Tom Brown,' first because its author is a very much greater writer than Hughes-he is, indeed, an artist-instyle of a calibre quite unusual in modern England, and much of his work possesses the delicacy which we find only in the best French writers; secondly, because he

is wholly without self-consciousness and without any moral to drive home; and lastly, but most important of all, because he comprehends, as Hughes hardly did, the essential shyness of all boys. He knows that they never reveal themselves wholly to each other any more than they do to their elders (we know nothing about schoolgirls, but we have been told that in this matter they are of a nature exactly opposite to that of the young males). Now this is a truth which writers like Mr Waugh and Mr Leslie not only fail to perceive, but which their brains are not at all capable of understanding. Each of them is so full of himself, and so anxious to display his own cleverness, or naughtiness, that he tries to make all his characters shout with the same blatancy as himself. Nothing, on the other hand, is more admirable than the frequent use which Mr Parker makes of aposiopeses and of actual silences. They run all through the book. Take this (from its opening pages) concerning a boy's delight in a new home, unexpectedly beautiful:

'He heard from the house behind him his mother calling. She was at a window brushing her hair; she was asking him what he thought of the new garden. He stood up with his bunch of cowslips. A blackbird shouted from a lilac-tree. He stood there with his cowslips. He could say nothing.'

You can see that there is a tragedy to come. The boy's father is going to die and the new home (called Tanyate) will all too soon have to be given up, although Martin, being an endowed scholar, will be able to remain at Eton. The tragedy, however, when it comes, only throws into greater relief the amazingly beautiful sketch of the mother and of her relation to the boy. Martin was æger with the mumps and was feeling dreadfully bored, in spite of the kindness of a few exmumpers who visited him in the sick-room. He had even been comforting himself by putting his fishing-rod together and taking it to pieces again; and he was wondering why he hadn't heard from home recently. Then the letter with the ill news comes, and then :

'The day had been unlike any day he could have imagined. It did not seem a period of time. Hundreds of things had happened since the morning; yet the hundreds of things were all one thing. He read his mother's letter over and over