years ago, voted by large majorities to burden themselves with special taxes for their support, the proceeds to go directly from the tax collector into the institutional treasuries. Thus provided with unfailing incomes adequate not only for support but, growing greater year by year as assessments increased, permitting additions and improvements, the institutions have flourished. It is popularly supposed that they had forever been placed, both in managements and support beyond the reach of impairing political fingers. Then, this year, an ingenious city-employed lawyer discovered a way to circumvent the will of the people as expressed in the law, and turn the proceeds of the special taxes into the general fund for use at the pie-counter. Sixteen out of twenty aldermen passed the circumventing ordinance, the Mayor approving. Did the people notice it! The volume of the raging, if it could have been made audible, would have disturbed the calm of the nation! Only the immediate bringing of suit to carry the matter before the highest court has temporarily subdued the uproar.

But one Alderman has ventured a justification: "What," said he, "do they want of more books when the library is chock full of books unused!" Whereat St. Louis enjoyed a great laugh; but its anger was in nowise appeased.

merely used in connection with the particular play with which he sought "to catch the conscience of the king"; but there has been an insistent and persistent and, to me, very irritating attempt on the part of many writers to make it appear that this is an isolated boosting by Shakespeare of "the play" in its generic sense.

From Charles Flammer, of San Francisco:

All of us have our pet aversions in actions as well as in written expressions. Two of mine are the wrong use of the word because for that, and the misuse of or for nor.

You introduced me to Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage," and I'm grateful to you for the introduction. The book has earned the high praise you gave it. Of my first pet aversion, Fowler writes:

"After such openings as The reason is, The reason why . . . is, the clause containing the reason must not begin with because, but with that."

And of Nor he says:

PRIZE

By Helen F. Watson, of Northfield, Minn. "Isn't there an epidemic, or a pandemic, of nostalgia among present-day

writers? In one recent novel the heroine has four attacks of it. She really should have myopia, as it is also popular."

By Eugene H. Lehman, of Tarrytown, N. Y. "Is there anything we can do to prevent camp directors and others from using... the self-contradictory union of words, canoe hike? At any rate, if this expression is awarded first place in the Ignoble Prize, perhaps others will shudder as do I when they hear and see it." By Susie M. Gaskins, of Front Royal, Va.: "The twisted or crooked smile and the throaty voice that I have seen frequently mentioned presumably as asset of the heroine."

an

From a logician in Springfield, Mass.: The much misused and misapplied phrase "The play's the thing.' Any careful reader of "Hamlet" knows that this phrase was

when there was no room for it)."

Our pet aversions are always with us, so you can believe, when I read your very interesting review of Turgenev Liberty in your city.

that these . . . stood out like the Statue of

In the third paragraph of your article you say "never for the purpose of scoring off his victim, or for theatrical distortion.' You intended the word nor in place of or.

Then "One of the reasons why Turgenev's exposition never satisfied anybody was because he was.' Fowler would say, "One of the reasons why Turgenev's exwas," and isn't this the more elegant way position never satisfied anybody is that he of saying it? You see not only is because changed to that, but the tense is changed from the past to the present. And why not, since the reason for the action applies to-day as much as it did during Turgenev's life, and it is the reason why, in the present time, you are attempting to explain.

As a foot-note to the above, I would suggest that instead of saying "one of the reasons why Turgenev's exposition

never satisfied," we might profitably omit the word "why."

From Massachusetts comes the following contribution:

It would seem that any one competent to compile a dictionary, would avoid some of the obvious absurdities claiming to be standard of proper orthography. Take the compound words ending in meter as a suffix, indicating the measure of the thing represented by the prefix, as in thermo-meter, baro-meter, micrometer. To be sure, the pronunciation of these and similar words, sounds as if the suffix was "ometer," but when the letter o does not appear in the prefix, it has no business there at all. For example, take the words speed-o-meter, audiometer, cyclometer, pedometer, and many others like them. If these are correct, why not taxiometer, altiometer, periometer? When a word was needed to describe things pertaining to Venice, what possible reason could there be for cutting out the letters "ic," and substituting "et"? Is not Venician a more obvious spelling? If I felt like spending time enough, I could add pages of such comment but I forbear.

From J. C. Meem, of Brooklyn, N. Y.:

In "As I Like It," January SCRIBNER'S, you quote from Archibald Marshall's "The Allbrights," page one, "An English family at breakfast is an affair of great significance."

It seems to me that while the assembling of a family at breakfast or the breakfasting of an English family may be an affair, an English family cannot be one whether it is eating breakfast or tobogganing down Mt. Everest.

From Frank W. Clancy, of Santa Fé, New Mexico:

I begin to fear that your war against two recent atrocities in our language, will meet with defeat. They are the misuse of meticulous and intrigue. I have seen these words even in recent advertisements, which are usually written in good English. I have just noticed two "intriguing" words to which I will briefly call your attention.

In a recent issue of the National Geographic Magazine, Mr. Herbert Corey has a very interesting article about things in Mexico, written in the first person, and at one place, he speaks of generously offering to some one a slice of cold fried egg, which had ceased to "intrigue" him, and in another magazine, I think it is Harpers, Mr.

Brailsford, who appears to be an Englishman, speaks of conflict or mixture of temperament and environment which might serve for the making of an "intriguing drama." I have heretofore thought that this misuse of intrigue and intriguing was an American monstrosity. Is it possible that it has also invaded the language of our Motherland?

I know it would be useless for any one to ask you to desist, no matter how useless your struggle may seem to be, because you are, like myself, what is called in Texas, a "damyankee," which, as my friend, Dan Moody, now Governor of Texas, told me was one word, and it is undoubtedly the fact that a "damyankee" is so "sot" in disposition, that he never recedes from any fight once undertaken. The name of that Governor has strong_indications of Yankee ancestry, but when I suggested that to him, he did not seem to be all responsive, and I discover that he was born in Texas.

A copy-reader on the San Francisco. Examiner sends me the following justification of the word flay:

The word FLAY as used in newspaper head-lines was submitted for your Ignoble Prize in the May issue of your magazine. It was proposed by a California woman who doubtless has read it in this newspaper, The Examiner.

Permit a blackball to be cast, please.

The head-line to which your correspondent objected was an indefinite one-SENATOR FLAYS RIVAL. That, of course, is too indefinite to be a good headline. There are or ought to be-96 senators. He should have been named, the flayer.

But the word FLAY is essential to our business.

Here is our problem:

What happens is: Senator William E. Borah excoriates the Permanent Court of International Justice, or whatever its name is.

We have to tell that story in a 96-point line, eight columns wide, counting 24 letters and spaces. So we write:

BORAH FLAYS WORLD COURT

a good line, well within the count. Flay is an excellent synonym for Excoriate. That is, Borah strips the hide off the World Court.

If we don't use 96-point headlines, Gothictype, the circulation manager tells us the paper will not be sold, and if the paper is not sold, it will not be read, and if the paper is not read, no one will know what Senator Borah says, and the Republic will fall.

From R. P. Fales, of Chicago:

I name for the Ignoble Prize all magazines that play hide-and-go-seek with their readers by tucking away somewhere in the front or back sections the interesting bits of information about their current contributors that most readers would be glad to read in connection with the articles-if they could find them. But no, they must be hid away like jam on the top shelf of a dark closet. Perhaps the publishers are moved by a laudable desire to provide innocent diversion for their readers, now that the vogue of the cross-word puzzle has waned. One might master the system of a single magazine, but if he reads several, each of which hides its biographical notes in a different corner, he becomes bewildered. Usually I find the notes, if at all, after I have finished reading everything else in the magazine, which is a good deal like being introduced to the guests after the party is over. The next great moral reform should be to induce magazine publishers to print what they have to say about a contributor either immediately under the author's name or as a foot-note. Radical, I know, but the voice of the proletariat has spoken, and its message is: We want our gravy with the meat, not served separately at a buffet at the opposite end of the room.

New members of the Faery Queene Club: Mrs. Marion Hall Clark, of Montezuma, Iowa. Mrs. Mary Temple Robinson, of Waterloo, Neb.; George Henry Danforth. Miss Alice M. Waterman, of Brattleboro, Vt., who calls attention to the fact that our modern colloquial word "booze" has good Spenserian authority.

Mr. Allen E. Whiting, a Yale graduate, entered the Fano Club not through the strait and narrow gate, but over the wall, which in this instance calls for commendation. He found the church which contains the picture closed because of an earthquake, so he climbed in through a window.

Nearly one hundred years before the founding of the Fano and Faery Queene Clubs, the Pickwick Club started on its immortal pilgrimage. It is pleasant to note that the centenary of this organization was fittingly observed. On Friday the 13th of May, in defiance of supersti

tion, an old-fashioned stage-coach, filled with men in the correct costumes, left the Golden Cross Hotel at Charing Cross and rolled to Rochester, precisely as happened on May 13, 1827. Pickwick is more real than many historical characters, only he developed in a more admirable manner than is usually observable in actual life. When we first meet him, he seems like the prototype of a president of a Rotary Club, as imagined by Sinclair Lewis; indeed there are many similarities between the Pickwick Club as first described and the Rotary as conceived by its enemies. But both Pickwick and his club develop in a manner that indicates one of many differences between Charles Dickens and our popular American novelist.

Counting them up the other day, I find I have 9,872 reasons for gratitude to Benjamin Franklin, of which I will mention one. He invented bi-focal eye-glasses. While I was engaged in deep meditation

on

this thought, I received a letter from C. N. Abernethy, of Pittsburgh. Mr. Abernethy is a realtor, and is as unlike Babbitt as a lion is unlike a tobaccoworm. He writes: "Seems to me you wear bi-focals. Let's get up an agitation in As I Like It' about the use of glasses in golf. Should bi-focals be worn, or distance-glasses or tinted lenses, with or without ear-holts and horn, composition or metal frames? One can cover a big field, and all of these items are for debate and each has its adherents."

Bi-focals should never be worn in golf, only distance-glasses; and there should always be ear-holts, and never pinchnosers. The only possible advantage in bi-focals would be the added penalty for looking up, but as all players look up some of the time, and some players look up all of the time, the bi-focals would merely stiffen an already severe penalty. We know that the late Edward Everett Hale never played golf, for his motto was "Look up, not down." If golf were a spiritual game, we should all be experts. I am still composing my treatise on golf, which is to be called "Thirty Years of Looking Up." The chapter on bunkers is being written by a Trappist Monk.

the run of certain private collections. But how otherwise he would fare may be judged from certain passages in Sir Walter Arm

strong's little book in the Ars Una series:

Reynolds is not well represented in our public galleries.

It is impossible to reach a complete idea of Gainsborough's powers from our public collections.

Romney has been still less

for the national collections in England are not utterly devoid of examples of the historic leaders just cited. But that these examples are not of what I might call the canonical order remains emphatically true, so as I revert to the

fortunate than Reynolds and Gainsborough in his fight for publicity. Scarcely any picture showing him quite at his best has won its way into a national collection. Hoppner has been even more unlucky than Ramsay in failing to make his proper entry into the nation's collections. No idea of his powers

can be formed from the National or the Portrait

Gallery, and he is almost entirely absent from the provincial museums.

With regard to the national collections, the same unhappy story has to be told about Lawrence as about so many other English masters. He is quite inadequately represented in our public

museums.

Of course these drastic statements have to be received with certain reservations,

question asked at the outset I offer another reply. It is that instead of going to London the student should travel in exactly the opposite direc

they are uniformly of astonishing quality.

DOCTOR HALE'S article in the July

number of this magazine gave a full account of the Huntington foundation, with special reference to the library, but his allusions to the art gallery were brief, so I may therefore go in some detail into its character. It is unique, as I have already remarked, and in more senses than one. For one thing the collection was

brought together in comparatively few years. At the foot of each description in the catalogue runs the legend, Acquired from Sir Joseph Duveen, and that redoubtable individual would appear to

Diana, Viscountess Crosbie. From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

have achieved something like a tour-deforce in his service to Mr. Huntington. Ransacking the private collections of Great Britain, he literally stopped at nothing. From the Duke of Westminster, for example, in 1921, he bought Gainsborough's Blue Boy and Sir Joshua's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. They had seemed immovable monuments in a

nation's artistic patrimony. Now they dwell on the Pacific coast! These two renowned masterpieces, surrounded by others of the same school, establish within our borders, in something like splendor, perhaps the world's most imposing memorial to the painter of an epoch. Unique? It is, to my mind, one of the most piquant episodes in the history of connoisseurship. Mr. Huntington was in love with the eighteenth-century British painters, and having resolved to assemble them under his roof, he adopted the highest standard and steadfastly adhered to it. It must have amused him as he meditated amongst his treasures to realize that no historian of the subject could forego the long journey to California. There in very truth he had recreated one of the seats of artistic tradition.

What is tradition? I have ventured to define it before in these pages as simply the tribute which the genuine artist pays to the wisdom of the finer spirits in the art of all ages. There is nothing of academic formula about it, there is nothing in it to obstruct the artist's free expression of himself. It is in this sense that the eighteenth-century British masters embody tradition. The Royal Academy was there but it imposed no routine upon the particular practitioners we have now to consider, and even though you may trace some nominally conventional strains in them, the genius pervading them is in no wise academic, but in each case remains essentially personal. They bear the stamp of a period. They mirror a fashion. They use more or less a common denominator of design. But they enforce the everlasting truth that an artist is known by the individual ability