IT would be a shame to set down one's first impression of the book; for to slang Lewis Carroll for not coming up to expectations in a collection of early fragments is pointless and positively unkind. Verse and prose, most of it is nowhere near "Alice"; and it is only when disappointment becomes too profound that something like the following comes to the reader's rescue:

"Lorenzo dwelt at Heigtington

(Hys cote was made of Dimity,)

Least-ways yf not exactly there,

Yet yn yts close proximity.

Hee called on mee--hee stayed to tee--

Yet not a word hee ut-tered,

Untyl I sayd, "D'ye like your bread

Dry?" and hee answered "Buttered."

Which does sound as if it came from the same man wrote "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

The small crazinesses that the young Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote for undergraduate magazines at Oxford have been exhumed and included; his letters have been gone over for anything that might be torn out of the context; bits (and good bits they are) are stuck in from the diary he kept during a tour on the continent. His genius for parody is at par in a novelette that takes Sir Walter Scott for a dizzy ride. The whole thing is a hodge-podge of good, bad and indifferent, consistently interesting only to a person who takes everything so seriously that he must study the development of the another of "Alice."

An English gentleman named Langford Reed edited the book to the accompaniment of a twenty page introduction that could, oh, so well, have been dispensed with. It dissertates (no less impressive word would convey the dreariness of the discussion) on the nature of true nonsense verse. Lewis Carroll's technique, and informs us triumphantly of the awful libel that the author of "Alice" may have been the inventor of cross-word puzzles. His comments and foot-notes sound as if they had been written for a volume of Thornton Burgess' "Mother West Wind Stories"; among them he convinced one reader that, talk as he may about the technique of Lewis Carroll's nonsense, Mr. Reed never yet say the joke in it all and has somewhat strained his eyes trying to look for it.

But, to end on a complimentary note, the illustrations are great.