The Spring Number of the Bookshelf will be published on Monday and will contain reviews of over 40 books. Lucius Beebe will review Robert Hillyer's new book of verse, "The Seventh Hill." Professor Edgell's book on American Architecture, Professor Munro's "The Invisible Government", and Professor Carver's "This Economic World" will all be reviewed. The list also includes "Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard", "Crusado", "Debonair", "Alice in the Delighted States", "Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing", "Bad Girl", "The Virgin Queene", "Reeds and Mud", "Perversity", "Mr. Weston's Good Wine", and "They Could Not Sleep".

A long list of biographies and essays will also be reviewed.

THE HALF-HEARTED. By John Buchan. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1928. $2.50.

"THE HALF-HEARTED" will never, it seems fairly safe to prophesy, become a classic of English literature, but it is a highly readable, plain novel. There is nothing complicated or enigmatic about the plot or its characters. There is nothing startlingly original, but on the other hand there is little that is annoyingly hackneyed or trite.

It is the story of a young Scotchman who has talent, honesty, and courage, but the fatal weakness of indecision. Having failed in love and in his chosen career, he goes to India to retrieve his honor. There, on the Kashmir frontier, he faces his great test and, of course redeems himself in a rather heroic but thoroughly satisfactory fashion.

John Buchan according to the jacket, is the "greatest romancer since Stevenson," and is a veritable jack-of-all trades, combining the activities of "lawyer, soldier, business man, novelist, historian, essayist, poet, and member of the parliament." At any rate, it is reasonable to infer that Mr. Buchan is an intelligent man of considerable good taste, shrewdness, and literary ability. In "The Half-Hearted", there is nothing to make the reader believe the contrary.

THE YEARS BETWEEN. 2 Vols--I. The Mysterious Cavalier: H. Martyr to the Queen. By Paul Feval and M. Lassez. Longnians, Green and Co. New York, 1928. $5.00.

ALMOST everyone who has read "The Three Musketeers" has also read the wholly admirable, if somewhat less thrilling, sequel "Twenty Years After." And not a few people who have done so have wondered what D' Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis were up to in the meantime. Two Frenchmen, acting with the approval of the Dumas heirs, and claiming to be possessed of manuscripts which were missing at the time that Dumas wrote, have supplied the two volumes which complete the historical chain.

Your admirer of Dumas will not find fault with their work. Zound's, Mortiou's, diavolo's there are in plenty. Gentlemen insult each other with perfect grace, and draw their long steel on the lightest provocation. Madame De Chevreuse still plots this time in trousers. And if Richelieu is becoming feeble, Mazarini "the snake replaces the eagle" is on hand to put obstacles in the way of redoubtable Gascon gentlemen. The three original musketeers are missing but the loss is slight when their places are taken by Cyrano de Bergerac and the young Chevalier Tancrede, whose antecedents will surprise the reader, but whose identity, like the plot of detective plays, is not to be divulged by the reviewer. V. O. J.

In some forty pages. Thomas H. Dickinson analyzes Governor Alfred E. Smith in THE PORTRAIT OF A MAN AS GOVERNOR (The MacMillian Co., New York, 1928. $1.) and finds him pleasing to the eye and mind. The moral quality of loyalty, the mental quality of mastery, he finds, have made Smith what he is, and will, perhaps, make him what his many supporters hope he will be. There is a foreword by George Foster Peabody.

Among books recently received is a little volume of A.A. Milne's published by Methuen and Company, London, in 1926. This collection of Milne's Verse is called FOR THE LUNCHEON INTERVAL, and is comparatively unknown in this country.