The volume has been misleadingly titled: only one ballade is included among roughly two dozen poems, the bulk of the book being taken up with plays and prose in many moods and on many subjects. This is as it should be. Esson is never really comfortable in any of the verse forms he attempts, whereas in both his stories and essays he writes with an easy assurance, often with flashes of the keen wit and satirical eye which sharpen the dialogue and characterisations in his plays. While much of the writing here was obviously written with an eye to publication in the popular press in a jokey, journalistic style, the essays on literary figures and on various aspects of the drama reveal a mind capable of shrewd discriminations expressing itself in elegant prose.

Four one-act plays are included: Australia Felix, The Sacred Place, The Woman Tamer and Dead Timber. The first does not seem to have been previously published while the others were originally published as Three Short Plays (1911). The editor has drawn his material from the original manuscript sources where they exist or from the first magazine or newspaper publication where they do not. Altogether a long­overdue and very welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in Australian letters.