The Streets of London. By Thomas Burke. (Batsford, 10s. 6d.).
English Lakeland. By Doreen Wallace. (Batsford, 8s. 6d.).
Corn Country. By C. Henry Warren. (Batsford, 10s. 6d.).
Reviewed by F. A. FULFORD THESE beautifully illustrated Batsford volumes make a good set of gift-books, and their written contents are as good as their pictures. But we have a fault to find with one of them, The lreels of London, by Thomas Burke, who while printing illustrations of the cobbled streets of the old capital, writes about life not only in the streets, but in the houses, mansions and taverns as well, using many quotations from authors of the past. The author has, however, shunned things Catholic in the work on London from 1600 and on, in which he might have described, but does not, scenes witnessed in the city's streets of the early seventeenth century, such as a Martyr's last journey from Newgale to Tyburn. Ile might have spoken of the Popish riots of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of our present-day summer-time processions
through garlanded East End streets. This, too, is London.
He attributes nevertheless — and rather doubtfully we think—the origin of the " please remember the Grotto ' custom of street children to the erection at one time of street shrines to St. James of Compostella, and makes a lapsus plume when saying a brewery in Tottenham Court Road was in existence there till 1918. It existed there well into the third decade of the century, we believe.
DOREEN Wallace's English Lakeland gives an interesting Cumbrian version of art
extract from the Bible. We deplore with the author the continuance of cock-fights in the Lake District.
Corn Country (C. Henry Warren), has an important and topical chapter devoted to the present position and future prospects of corn production in this country,