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MR. Frederick Niven's recent references in these pages to the Canterbury Poets anthology of ballades and rondeaus suddenly reminded me that a rondeau of my own was printed in the little book. Although the year 1887, when the book, which is now rather difficult to pick up, appeared, is a long way off, I do not in the least feel like Methuselah. What, however, does lend a sense of the passing years is the change in literary taste, and the humpty‐dumptying by one generation of critics of the heroes of an older group. We have had a good opportunity of witnessing the process on a wholesale scale in the belittling of the Victorians, and Henley himself is a peculiarly ironic example of the process, for, having bludgeoned many literary reputations, his own has slumped, for the collected edition of his work which appeared a few years ago left the younger school of critics cold, while the influence of his rather truculent “young men” on the Scots Observer has faded.

THE editor of this journal has asked me to write about “Bookish Scotland,” taking the “broadest view of the subject.” But when I come to think of it, I wonder if there really is any such entity as a “Bookish Scotland.”

WHEN the Editor, always fertile in ideas, suggested that I should write an article on “a literary man's files,” by which he meant my “reference aids,” I felt very much like Files‐on‐Parade when he queried the worried colour sergeant over the fate of Danny Deever.

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.

THERE are rooms with books in them, there are book‐rooms, and there are libraries. Every book‐lover will recognise these statements as solemnly true. It seems to me that the real library might be known by a blind man: for it smells like a library: it speaks at once of old leather and ancient glue and calf and morocco binding and has in it the very fume of history and the passage of time. Blessed are those who possess one and the capacity of enjoying its odorous sanctity. This is not given to many. I am not of that high order. True that I have some rooms with books in them, but such can satisfy none but meagre souls. As I was brought up among books I have over and above these a book‐room in which nothing really counts but books at which good people hasten to peer, while the unitiated merely wonder.