When all else fails, wine, friendship, eating, making love, the consciousness of virtue, and we find ourselves lamenting our lost youth, we may turn to Trivia and find the true consolation of life. . . . "Reading, the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication."

That is the whole secret of Trivia's success it is full of intoxications.

. .

"I should be all right ." he writes. "If it weren't for these sudden visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue, little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands, or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should be like everybody else, and as blameless a ratepayer as any in our Row."

That is just the point: he might be all right, but we should have had no Trivia: it is just because he has had the sense to realise the importance of the fleeting vision and refused to be "bluffed " into believing in the ordinary man's sense of values that he has been able to scatter his pearls of wisdom over these all too brief pages.

Trivia not only deserves prominence, it deserves permanence. The few who care most passionately for its clear-sightedness, its warm, rich humour, its profound truth, its wholesale destruction of shams, and its touches of gorgeous colour and subtle music, will not lightly allow it to pass unrecognised. There is no book quite like it.

S

IR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH'S reputation as a literary critic rests on three books, Studies

in Literature, Shakespeare's Workmanship, and On the Art of Writing. In all these he has brought something quite fresh into the academic world to which he now belongs, an atmosphere that one associates with Hazlitt and Frank Harris, and certainly not with University Dons; in other words, he approaches literature as a man of the world who realises how near it all is to actual life, and how far removed from codified formulæ or the rarefied atmosphere of the study.

In Studies in Literature, which is a collection of familiar discourses, and only a prelude to sterner work, he leads off with an essay on The Commerce of Thought which serves as an excellent index of the richness of his imagination. Why does not some one, he asks, write a History of Trade-Routes?

"By what caravan tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constantinople? What sort of men worked goods down the Rhone valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? . . . How did the Crusaders handle transport and commissariat ? ... Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux, Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks? ... Why and how did England and Flanders come to supply Europe, the one with wool, the other with fine linen and naperies? . . .

These and like questions are of the first importance, if you would understand history, if you would take hold, in imagination, of the human motives which make history... ." Roughly, he says, it is love and hunger that drive man to make wars and to migrate, though hundreds of thousands of men have left home and country for the sake of learning. Trade disputes, money-these are the causes of wars. Let your imagination play on these old trade-routes and you will wonderfully seize the romance of history. "You will see... dotted ships on wide seas, crawling trains of emigrant wagons, pioneers, tribes on the trek, . families loading their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, olive-gatherers, long trains of African porters, desert caravans, dahabeeyahs pushing up the Nile, puffs of smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada, or northward from Cape Town, Greenland whalers, trappers around Hudson's Bay.'

It is easy to see, in the light of this extract, the spirit of the romantic novelist, the passionate enthusiast of far-off days, the devotee of an ever-living history hard at work to rouse his pupils to a like interest. His fancy plays lightning-like on all sorts of obscure corners, revealing through the dust the underlying glory. From the dissemination of plants ("take some seed that has lodged on his long tramp northward in the boot-sole of a common soldier in Vespasian's legion. The boot reaches Dover, plods on, wears out, is cast by the way, rots in a ditch. From it, next spring, Britain has gained a new flower ") he passes to the wanderings, alightings, and fertilising of man's thought.

"Some one copies down a little poem on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill: the paper goes to wrap a mummy; long centuries pass; a tomb is laid bare

of the covering sand, and from its dead ribs they unwind a passionate lyric of Sappho's." Again: "How do you account for the folk-stories? Take Cinderella, or Red Riding Hood, or Hop-o'-my-Thumb. How can you explain that these are common not only to widely scattered nations of the race we call Aryan, from Asia to Iceland, but common also to savages in Borneo and Zululand, the South Sea Islander, the American Indian? The missionaries found them there. . . . The story of Jason and Medea we find in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds and the Zulus, as well as in Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European household tales."

It is the Roads. "I see the Roads glimmer up out of the morning twilight with the many men, like ants, coming and going upon them; meeting, passing, overtaking; knights, merchants, carriers, justiciars, King's messengers ; friars, pardoners, minstrels, beggar-men; it is noticeable how many of the great books of the world-the Odyssey, the Eneid, the Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, The Pilgrim's Progress, Gil Blas, Pickwick, and The Cloister and the Hearthare books of wayfaring." He might have added Lavengro, Romany Rye, The Path to Rome, Travels on a Donkey in the Cevennes, An Inland Voyage, and half a hundred more. The recipe of a good book would seem to be, plenty of food, plenty of travel.

"In the commerce of thought the true carrier is neither the linotype machine, nor the telegraph at the nearest post office, nor the telephone at your elbow, nor any such invented convenience: but even such a wind as carries the seed; the old, subtle, winding, caressing, omnipresent wind of man's aspiration. For the secret-which is also the reward-of all learning lies in the passion for the search."

On the much vexed question of ballads "Q" has much that is interesting to say: he ridicules the idea of communal authorship thus: "If you think a ballad can be composed by public meeting, call a public meeting, and try! In human experience poetry doesn't get written in that way: it requires an author. These ballads, though overlaid by improvements, are things of genius, individual." On the other hand, he realises that “ the really important point about ballads has nothing to do with 'who wrote them?' even if that could be discovered at this time of day. It matters very little to us, at any rate, if they were written by the people. What gives them their singularity of nature is that, whoever wrote them, wrote them for the people."

As to what a ballad is Professor Ker says that "a ballad is an idea, a poetical form, which can take up any matter and does not leave that matter as it was before a ballad is Sir Patrick Spens, The Douglas Tragedy, Childe Maurice, and things of that sort."

Janet has kilted her green kirtle

A little abune her knee;

And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little abune her bree,

And she is on to Miles Cross

As fast as she can hie.

About the dead hour o' the night

She heard the bridles ring;
And Janet was as glad at that

As any earthly thing.

And first gaed by the black, black steed,
And syne gaed by the brown;

But fast she gript the milk-white steed
And pu'd the rider down.