Margot's Argot

LAY SERMONS--Margot Asquith-- Doran ($2.50). Her alert countenance, her boundless arrogance, her crude curious argot, her inquisitive mind with its eagerness to disclose whatever trifles it may contain, have made the Countess of Oxford and Asquith famous. Her autobiography, published in 1922, was a mansion of closets, each inhabited by a dusty skeleton. The enormity of its sale was caused by a universal appetite for prying gossip; its result was an eagerness among publishers to coax Author Asquith toward further indiscretions of the printed word. Her present volume is full of good sense: "Most men and women Eat, Drink, and Sleep too much to keep their minds active or their, bodies healthy." If such iconoclasms on Carelessness, Taste, Fashion, Human Nature, Fame. Character, Politics, had been devised by Mary Smith they would have remained unpublished. Devised by Margot Asquith, illustrated by anecdotes about her friends in the British peerage, their didactic importance is increased; they exhibit entertainingly the workings of a well-known mind.