Four Favourites

Lewis. Longmans, $3.50.

Mr. Lewis surveys the entertaining trajectory of four “specialists in careerism”: Madame de Pompadour, Lord Melbourne, Don Manuel Godoy, and Potemkin. He thus profiles in miniature the courts of Louis XV, Queen Victoria, Carlos IV, and Catherine the Great. “I have done what I can,” says the author, “to supply such details of contemporary décor as help to make the actors come more vividly alive,”and in this he has admirably succeeded. Four Favourites is polished and urbane portraiture by a distinguished stylist. Mr. Lewis’s historical views, however, are extravagantly colored by his fierce clericalism and anti-democratic bias.