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the New l!:urope which we hope will now preserve its peace under

the auspices of the League of ations set up at Geneva.

That is only one small ítem, however, in a library list which

runs to over seven hundred and sixty volumes. The largest slice

of this huge provision is, as a matter of course, given to the

tyrannous demands of fiction. But in carrying out the scheme,

the directors and editors contrived to keep in mind that books,

like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present

volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books,

both in the same section and even more significantly in other

sections. With that

ide~

too, novels like Walter Scott's

l vanhoe

and

Fortunes of Nigel,

Lytton's

Harold,

and Dickens's

Tale of

Two Cities

have been used as pioneers of history and treated as

a sort of holiday history books. History itself in our day is tend–

ing to grow more documentary and less literary; and "the

historian who is a stylist," as one of our contributors, the late

Thomas Seccombe, said, " will soon be regarded as a kind of

Phrenix." But in the history department of Everyman's Library

we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from

every school in turn. We have Grate, Gibbon, Finlay, Macaulay,

Motley, Prescott; we have among earlier books the Venerable

Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and we have just com–

pleted a Livy

six volumes in an admirable new translation

by Canon Roberts.

"You only, O Books," said Richard de Bury, "are liberal .and·

independent; you give to ali who ask." The delightful variety,

the wisdom and the wit which are at the disposal of Everyman

in his own library may well, at times, seem to him a little

embarrassing. He may turn to Dick Steele in the

Spectator

and

leam how Cleornira dances, when the elegance of her motion is

unimaginable and " her eyes are chastised with the simplicity

and innocence of her thoughts." He may tum to Plato's Phredrus