that is left of her head. Old women, nay, women in general, are said to be the fiercest of all during such executions, their wild clamor covering the piercing cries of the victim.

'Genuine hyenas!' the British Consul said, who had witnessed one such execution in Kashan.

The crowd was already flooding the square itself. In the centre there was a small empty space guarded by policemen. Whoever was too insistent upon getting ahead was clubbed upon the forehead. Those people have remarkable skulls which never crack. A deep hole was dug in the ground, with a mound of soft earth near by which was to cover the woman up to her throat.

There was not a single Persian in the crowd but carried stones. People were betting as to who would first shed her blood. Women were howling fiercely, ahead of time, so that your eardrums cracked.

We all sat upon the balcony of the Consulate. My heart beat so that it hurt. What plan could possibly succeed against those fifty thousand irritated, revengeful Persians? As well try to tear a tiger's prey from his claws and all of these people were such tigers.

demned. The Shah Nasr-ed-Din did not see such a tremendous crowd upon his arrival in the city some time before. What colors! What pictures! Roses, roses everywhere, a veritable garden of roses all around the infamous black hole in the ground.

The Consul looked at his watch and called his secretary.

'Everything ready?' he asked mysteriously.

'Yes, sir. You see there -' and he pointed into the depths of a long street that opened in front of us. Instead of flat roofs, the cupolas of mosques were seen in the bluish distance, half concealed by the huge green crowns of the trees. Something red and black was dimly seen in the shade.

'All right,' said the Consul, and lighted a cigar.

But in the meantime the howls below reached a climax. All this multitude might have been upon the wheel of torture for the noise it was now making. There was a tempest of fury, rage, maledictions. Thousands of demons were unchained upon the city square. Windows, doors, the very stones seemed to clamor with inhuman voices. Thousands of clenched fists were shaking in the air. Under the

'Better wait. It's going to be interesting,' said the Consul, 'or you'll miss a most comical scene something impossible outside of the Orient.'

Below us was a sea of those conical caracul caps and multicolored khalat. Women were huddled in white scarfs. Upon the roofs, all around us, women and children crowded together: not an inch of space left free. Mothers raised their little children in the air to let them see better. A charming baby with huge black eyes made believe that he, too, with his little chubby hand was throwing a stone at the con

diers led-nay, pulled a woman with tied hands. Her veil was torn off her face. Her long braids whirled around her from one side to another. With my field glass I saw two wide eyes filled with terror. Upon a balcony near the arch the Persian Governor appeared. His eyes met those of the Consul, and he smiled.

Presently the policemen were clearing the way for the soldiers and their victim.

'Habarda! Habarda!' (Give way!) They threw themselves into the multitude like madmen, frantically clubbing and lashing the humanity around them,

beating the smooth-shaven necks with the flat of their swords, kicking the black caps off to the ground. The crowd obediently gave way, opening a broad passage. Into this passage Into this passage sinuous, hairy, sunburned arms were projecting, clenching handfuls of stones and threatening the condemned. I noticed the amazing beauty of her deathly pale face with gleaming eyes and finely arched eyebrows.

Our Englishman rose slightly and the Persian Governor from across the square made him a sign. The woman was already next to the hole. My breath failed. Indeed, the Frenchman must have been right! What miracle could save her now? One more minute and it would be too late. Half a minute

ten seconds. The hole was close by her. I shut my eyes just when the Consul pulled out a red handkerchief. From the bluish depth of the street with the cupolas a volley of shots cracked, as if a mountain had burst asunder. Disconnected shots followed. The mob howled now in a mood of utter bewilderment.

The Cossacks set in upon it.

'Flee! Save yourselves!' they shouted. 'Bakhtiary - the robbers broke into the city. The whole desert has risen against Shiraz -'

There followed a few moments of indescribable confusion, And a real miracle happened: not a single veiled figure remained upon the roof. The houses might well have been those of a dead city, with all their windows shut and latticed, their balconies deserted, their arches deep and empty. The soldiers who were dragging the woman fled first, leaving their rope and their victim tied to it. You could not see their heels, they ran so quickly.

However, the frantic Cossacks kept galloping wildly back and forth upon the square and shooting aimlessly. The only things that remained there

besides themselves were two dogs who tried to make their escape, rushing hither and thither in mortal terror, and thousands of conical caracul caps and slippers that fell off the men's heads and feet. A group of women appeared from the Consulate, took the victim, and surrounding her as with a cloud, disappeared.

'Sir,' the Englishman turned to the Frenchman; 'you are now convinced that the British do not always deceive. At least, not this time.'

'Bravo! Bravo!' The Frenchman was utterly embarrassed.

"The best of it all, gentlemen,' the Consul continued, 'is that those Cossacks were perfectly sincere. They were not acting any part at all.' 'How?'

'Exactly. My clerks and kawas have so completely surprised them that they never even stopped to think that the bakhtiary could not possibly reach Shiraz as suddenly as that. The brave lions of Persia! They were so badly scared, they fired in perfect good faith, and they fired in the air, not seeing where their fantastical robbers were coming from!'

General consternation.

'And now, gentlemen,' the Consul went on, 'my men will certainly not want any pay for this affair. We'll shake their hands and drink to their health; that's all. As to the money the four hundred tomans, I propose it to you to offer them to his Highness the Governor of Shiraz, the only man in Shiraz who has brains and who did not honestly believe a thing about the bakhtiary.'

'But he won't take it!' I exclaimed, inadvertently.

The Englishman turned to me in

amazement.

"The Shah himself would take it. Only perhaps he would ask for more. The only ones who take nothing here

are those that are not offered anything.'

'Messieurs,' the Frenchman addressed us in a rather friendly voice, evidently intending to smooth over his previous blunder. 'Let us now collect something for this unfortunate woman. I shall subscribe fifty tomans.'

The Englishman bristled up. His face reddened, and the two tufts of red

hair that took the place of his eyebrows settled down upon his eyes.

"Take back your tomans, sir,' he said. "This woman is now under protection of Her Majesty the Queen of England, my august monarch; and consequently under the protection of the British people.'

'Oh, c'est épatant!' was all the poor Frenchman was able to utter.

A YEAR after the first shock of pleasure occasioned by The Queen of China, one had started wondering whether the author was, after all, just another of the cultured and very clever young men with which the universities seem to supply modern literature in embarrassing profusion. Recently and almost simultaneously appear two selfcontradictory answers to the halfformed question: Mr Shanks's First Essays on Literature of which more anon - and his fourth book of verse, The Island of Youth.

Besides confirming a former suspicion that Mr. Shanks as a poet was oversophisticated, his latest volume of poetry enables us to justify rationally our pleasure at the publication of The Queen of China. And the appearance of two novels during the interregnum of only three years serves to explain the narrative element in his poetry as something fundamental to the man's mind even while underlining the too constant facility of the poetry.

The sophistication of The Island of Youth has produced an extension of the facility which in the previous volume was already replacing the restraint and shyness of an artist intensely conscious of what his forerunners had accomplished. The change may also be due to an intellectual conviction that modern poets are too fearful of stretching themselves out full-length. Mr. Shanks is no longer fearful. The Island of Youth, which lends its title to the volume containing it, is a well-told story in verse, moving with not quite sufficient impetus, but to the tune of delicate cadences. It opens:

Hardly the first sweet day of sun and showers
On which with dewy lashes the world awakes,
And in the pale glass of the stretched sky,
Misty with her own tears, sees blurred and dim
Her half-forgotten youth - hardly that day
Had stepped from troubled wave to quiet wave
Before the maidens of the island learnt
They had a new companion.

No nervousness about the writer of that piece of redundant poetizing and of many similar passages in this book.

Achilles' mother even the Greek origin of the story confirms the new self-assurance of the poet-Achilles' mother, Thetis, had hidden him in the form of a maiden among the maidens of Scyros to avert the doom of a violent death foretold for him by the oracle. It was also foretold that the Greeks should not take Troy without his help. Ulysses, sent to find him, does so by a trick. During his concealment on the island Achilles loves Deidamia, the king's daughter, who is one of the maidens and who searches the island for the

beautiful 'Stranger' after her sudden disappearance from among them:

Deidamia through the olive trees,
A slip of white that dimly drifted on
Like sunshine pale in sea-abysms drowned,
Searched groping and astray.

She comes close to the Stranger, now in the form of Achilles:

And by the darkness where the hero stood,
Only a shadow paler than the rest
Troubled that shadow with her gentle plea.

While she pleads:

'Return to us, return, and we with games And gentle love will woo you to ourselves.

He stood

As rigid as a cypress tree at noon

When all the mountain sleeps and on her side
The woods are breathless. Then with painful cry
At one step from the thicket he advanced
And in the moonlight tall and naked appeared,
Saying with harsh, loud voice, 'I am Achilles!'
Whereat the girl moaned low, shrinking aside,
And all life's terror flickered in her gaze.

Achilles, with a quiet voice that was like hill-thunder, reproves the shrinking girl for fearing truth as she had for

The weight of unexpected knowledge grew,
As harsh a weight to carry as may be
In mortal womb the progeny of a god.
Yet never did the proud and stem-straight neck
Sway at the burden; and in those wide eyes
Horror gave way to wonder, wonder drew in
A sharp and dolorous ecstasy. At last
He, bending down, another answer read
To his own cry. There was in their embrace
No kindness nor no pleasure, but the strength
Of floods unloosened, as their spirits rose
Dizzy, and blind through the void fields of night.

This is both good blank verse and passionate poetry; and if Mr. Shanks would forget modern theories about how narrative poems must be written, and refrain from descending so frequently to poetic cliché or to the pro

saic, we should be able to welcome in him our twentieth-century Keats. There is not much poetry in his latest book which reaches this level, however, and too much which need not have been written at all, capable and tasteful as it is.

Blank verse was the medium of the best work in the Queen of China volume, where the poems in rhyme, except that brilliant tour de force, 'Fête Galante: The Triumph of Love,' move with lame rhythms. The most satisfying poems, 'A Dialogue' and "The King's Dancer,' are both in blank verse, as is the dramatic piece, "The Queen of China,' which is justly described by the quotation-preface:

'How we spun

A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life.'

It was just this deft skill of weaving shrouds of poetic talk which suggested a doubt about the author, but the titlepoem of The Island of Youth clears

matters in doubt. One would not now question the validity of Mr. Shanks's claim to the title of true poet, but it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that he is writing much too much. Some one hundred and twenty-five more well-filled, printed pages of verse two years after The Queen of China appeared, a second novel and a big book of critical essays, besides the heartbreaking grind of journalism to which Mr. Shanks, in common with the majority of living English poets, is forced to submit, does not leave time enough nor energy for the travail of true poetry.

Croce made a wise distinction between the poetic and the biographical or practical personality of Shakespeare, between the æsthetic values of his work and the acts and experiences of the man himself. Nowadays, when poets earn most of their livelihood by criticism, one must beware of criticizing their criticisms in the same breath as their poetry. Yet one may be reasonably grateful for such a peep into a poet's study as Mr. Shanks's First Essays affords, and if I am going to ignore the warning just written, I shall lay the blame upon the author of First Essays. These are excellently interesting for their matter, and as revelations of the poet turned journalist they are valuable. Mr. Shanks has not even evaded the severity of his handicap as critic by choice of established classics for subject, as Mr. Middleton Murry did so successfully in his Countries of the Mind. Perhaps The Old Indispensables and The People of the Ruins, Mr. Shanks's two novels, may without undue depreciation be included in the evidences of the poet compelled to serve as journalist, though here is a case where 'time-serving' becomes respectable and almost an enviable term.

No, not enviable, for it is pretty certain that the novelist will be poorly re

warded for his labors in writing these two already dated novels — the one a rush of rollicking farce satirizing limpetlike and superfluous Government departments, the other a clever piece of Wellsian prophesying which, with Men Like Gods, Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage, Morris's News from Nowhere, Hudson's The Crystal Age, and Butler's Erewhon at hand, we can easily do without, for the gleaming touches of beauty in it which come from the poet either do not belong to this work or else Mr. Shanks sacrificed the best he might have done as one of the prophets of Utopia, so that hints of it fall like grain on the stony desert.

Just as Mr. Shanks is a poet, he is also a subtle thinker. These terms are deliberately selected, because a careful consideration of his poetry produces the conviction that he has not yet put his intellect into it, though he is very close to the stage which Keats had reached at the recasting of Hyperion. 'A good job too!' you exclaim? But every poet must reach this crisis, and surmount it, or else become an echo of himself. And profundity in poetry is not didactic preaching, nor philosophical thoughtspinning, nor the obscure humor which generally spoils Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell's most promising work. Perhaps Mr. Walter de la Mare is the profoundest living English poet.

First Essays contains an admirable study of "The Poetry of Mr. John Freeman,' in which the author, examining Mr. Freeman's didactic tendency, says: "Truth of no sort, religious or scientific or philosophical, becomes truth of poetry until it is made poetical - until, that is to say, it is exposed to the fusing heat of contemplative ecstasy which is the specific and indispensable condition of poetic creation. When this is absent, the truth escapes the clumsy attempt to state it in bare terms; and the result is something