ABSTRACT
One might have supposed that it would be better, or been prepared that it should be worse, but one would hardly have guessed that Mr. Huxley's Music at Night is simply a good book of essays. There is noth ing particularly profound or brilliant about it, and nothing careless or ill-balanced or underweight. He has published a book that is in the proper tradition of literary essay-writing: it has point, it has force and variety, it is written well and it reads well. The proof that these essays are good, and yet neither extraordinary nor unique, is that they so often remind us of other good essayists. It is not that they echo people, but that they resemble them: certain paragraphs might have been written in turn by Rebecca West, Walter Lippman, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, H. L. Mencken and Bertrand Russell.
