church after Schleswig cathedral, which isn't in Denmark anyway. Ribe is full of traditions from the time of the Valdamars. Queen Dagmar died there. In fact it carries one back to Denmark of the middle ages more than any place I have seen here.

The Faerie Queene Club is entered by George W. Parsons of Springfield, Mass., who writes that he has visited 174 cities on the North American continent, and that he now finds people everywhere eager to qualify for this club; also by Ignota, of Burkehaven, N. H., who read the poem at the age of fourteen, and "Sir Charles Grandison" in French at sixteen; by Mrs. Charlotte Newell, of Baltimore. George W. Johnston, of New York, writes:

I have been much interested in your Faerie Queene Club. Would you mind if I proposed a dozen candidates in a bunch? It is hard enough to persuade one person to read the whole poem, but to persuade a dozen at a time is so out of the ordinary that perhaps you would care to hear the story as to how it came about.

I prepared for college at a private school in Frankfort, Ky., conducted by Mr. James W. Dodd, afterward professor of Latin in Vanderbilt University. He was a marvellous and entrancing teacher, entirely original, bound by no rules and given to the telling of long stories which fascinated and inspired his pupils. He laughed at ordinary standards of accomplishment. For example, I have had him give our class a whole book of Virgil for a lesson, and the next day the class made good. He organized a literary society called the Polymnian, which was hard to get into and harder to stay in. Not only did we have weekly meetings, but once or twice a year we had to report and be examined upon a special line of reading composed generally half of history and half of poetry. We thought nothing of writing 500 lines of a Shakespearean play from memory on examinations. These degrees grew harder and harder, and for the third degree, I think it was, we had to report on the whole of the Faerie Queene and write numberless quotations, and so it happened that in the course of time there were at least a dozen of us boys and girls who read every word of the following:

Faerie Queene Paradise Lost

Paradise Regained, and all the other English poems of Milton, together with some of the Latin ones.

Dean Raymond Walters, of Swarthmore, writes:

It happens that Mr. Galsworthy has himself answered the question you ask in the October SCRIBNER'S. He has gone on record as favoring the doctrines of "Foggartism" put forward by Michael Mont in "The Silver Spoon."

In the London Sunday Times of September 27, 1925, Mr. Galsworthy took up a dislous state of England" and gave what he cussion by Sir Philip Gibbs as to "the parconceived to be "two underlying measures of remedy":

"The first, of course, is the expansion of emigration to the Dominions, but with a frank recognition of the fact that the Dominions will not accept spoiled material.” (Three full paragraphs were devoted to developing this.)

"The other fundamental measure of remedy that I have to whisper is not new either. I have seen it somewhere propounded, and I suppose it lodged in my inconvenient imagination. It is simply that the Government should control wheat; . . . recovery in agriculture-a going back to the land—is an absolute necessity for England, now."

It is characteristic, I think, of the detachment of Mr. Galsworthy's art as a novelist that the most careful reading of "The Silver Spoon" yields no inference as to his personal advocacy of these economic doctrines.

I was informed by a famous surgeon that the facts in "Microbe Hunters" were facts, though I deplored the manner in which they were presented. Two scientific men now write me in protest.

The Journal of the American Medical Association for October 16:

The history of scientific medicine is as romantic a tale as ever attracted the notice of novelist or poet. Numerous writers have already told the stories in many forms, and the public begins to appreciate more and more what medicine has accomplished. The records of achievement are to be found first, of course, in the scientific language of original investigators published in the technical periodicals devoted to medical progress. From these first-hand accounts medical historians, public-health educators, leaders in medicine, novelists, and writers on medicine for the press have derived the information which they retell in more understandable if not more fascinating form to an interested public. When "Microbe Hunters," by Paul de Kruif, recently appeared, the book was

welcomed as a most readable account of the work done by great investigators in the fields of bacteriology and insect-transmission of disease. A few critics—notably reviewers in The Journal and in Hygeia-were inclined to doubt the desirability of the flippant journalese in which most of the book was phrased, and to question the reproduction of imaginary conversations in slang and dialect alleged to have taken place in the laboratories and jungles where microbe hunters sought their prey. The gospel of microbe hunters is facts, and it is on facts that de Kruif repeatedly places his emphasis in eulogizing Koch and Roux and Grassi and others. "The facts of science," he would have Grassi say, "are greater than the little men who find those facts." And now in a letter published in this issue of The Journal, Ross, Nabarro, Low, Castellani, and Christy urge that the de Kruif account of their work is "apocryphal" and drawn "almost only from his own imagination." The history of medicine is as romantic a story as the novelists might tell-but if it purports to be history it should not be too romantic.

Frank W. Clancy, of Santa Fe, sends me a valuable note on eighteenth-century slang, especially as used in the works of Fielding:

How do slang phrases originate? Does any one ever consciously and intentionally create such things? We incline to the opinion that they are accidentally evolved. If we cannot originate, however, perhaps we can revive an old one.

In 1734 there was a farce "acted at the Theatre-Royal, by his majesty's servants,' entitled "An old man taught wisdom; or, The Virgin unmasked," which was writ by one Fielding, and deals with a father's attempted arrangements to marry off his daughter with a large marriage portion, several suitors appearing, and it is plain that "pure" and "purely" were used in that day in colloquial slang-like manner, something "fierce" and "dandy," which latter is abominable, have been in recent years, as the following examples will show.

as

The girl, responding to her father's talk about a husband, expresses more of a desire for a coach and six, and says: "I never dreamt of a husband in my whole life that I did not dream of a coach. I have rid about in one all night in my sleep, and me thought it was the purest thing.'

Again, conversing with the first suitor who appears, whom she especially dislikes, she is told by him that after marriage, she may have any one else, to which she says: "may

I? Then I'll have Mr. Thomas, by Goles ! Why this is pure! la! they told me other stories."

The suitor, a little after, tells her he will be the same after marriage as before "unless in one circumstance; I shall have a huge pair of horns upon my head"; to which she says "Shall you! that's pure, ha, ha, what a comical figure you will make."

Another aspirant comes, a dancing master, whose appearance and talk are very pleasing, and, in the course of the interview, she says "Lard, sir! I don't know what to say to these fine things. He's a pure man! (aside)."

A little after she says, in an aside, “It is a pure thing to give one's self airs."

After he leaves the stage, she soliloquizes about him, and, referring to the “fiddle” which early teachers of dancing used, says: "He shall play and I'll dance; that will be pure."

It seems clear that "pure" did lend itself to a great variety of meanings, quite as different and inconsistent as those attached to some words in our own time.

In one of the novels of Jeffrey Farnol, the time of which must be not far from Fielding's day, at least once a similar use is made of "pure."

An interesting letter from a famous English novelist, who will not let me print her name with it:

I know you were a great admirer of dear Henry James, that best known and perhaps least read genius.

...

Well, Henry James is a Classic; who reads Classics now-a-days, or cares tuppence about them? I fear I am growing cynical? I felt this a few days ago when I went to the Memorial Service to A. B. Walkley, The Times dramatic critic, the head of his profession, generally brilliant but often uncertain in his views. Every week besides his dramatic criticism he had a column in The Times. I expected to see a crowd at the Memorial Service, of actors and actresses, and dramatists; there were hardly any of these, only many Journalists and Representatives of Literary Societies and the Garrick Club. But the others, those he appraised and blamed, and at least carefully considered, were conspicuous by their absence. ... By the way, it may interest you to know that he is succeeded on The Times by Charles Morgan, who has been his understudy for some time. He is considered by far the most brilliant of the younger Dramatic Critics. It is a big appointment to be dramatic critic on The Times, and cuts him off from con

tributing signed work to any other English newspaper.... I hear, by the way, that his sole signed contribution to dramatic criticism will be a weekly article in the New York Times.

The Revue Angle-Américaine continues to be filled with interesting and valuable articles. Its book reviews are done by experts. In a criticism of the French trans, lation of Waldo Frank's "City Block" (by A. Digeon) the philosophical excesses and the immense potential power of our young American writer are fairly set forth:

On y retrouve souvent sinon l'influence, au moins l'inspiration de Zola, de son réalisme copieux, de son brutal symbolisme, qui s'obstine à trouver un sens à la vie quotidienne. Tout cela est poussé au paroxysme, obscurci de tirades d'une poésie véhémente, boursouflé d'une philosophie confuse. Heureusement ce visionnaire sait se discipliner lorsqu'il le veut jusqu'au plus modeste réalisme, et il atteint alors au pathétique simple et direct. Plus que Rahab, City Block fait pressentir les grandes œuvres qu'écrira Waldo Frank lorsqu'il sera entièrement délivré des formules.

As I have frequently been accused of over-indulgence in superlatives, I thought I would look around a bit-and I find that

superlatives are also used by others who are wiser and nobler than I.

Joseph Wood Krutch: Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" is "the greatest novel of our generation."

H. L. Mencken on "My Antonia": "No romantic novel ever written in America is

one-half so beautiful."

Poetry": "Mr. Bridges can show a larger body of first-rate lyrical work, flawless in inspiration and in technique, than any other English poet."

In "The Augustan Books of Modern

Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Clarke: Disraeli was "the greatest Englishman who was born and died in the nineteenth century." Professor J. B. S. Haldane: "Einstein is the greatest Jew since Jesus."

Many advertisements are put in the form of questions, the object being either to awaken or shame the reader. I have amused myself lately by framing answers to some of them:

Q. How many of Nature's Secrets do you UNDERSTAND?

W

WHEN the interests of art were first taken under the wing of the great fabric that commemorates the name of Andrew Carnegie, in Pittsburgh, the president of Carnegie Institute was the late William N. Frew. There lies before me a faded letter that he wrote to the late John W. Beatty, the director who had organized the opening exhibition. This letter, dating from the fall of 1897, contains a passage so felicitously descriptive of the work that has been going on there ever since that I am glad to reproduce it now, as a preliminary to a survey of the Twenty-fifth International.

"As to the institution that is so dear to the hearts of all of us," he says, "I have from the first set before myself an ideal which is Perfection. We may never reach it, but we will never get well started on the road if we are content to rest satisfied with anything less. One other thing that I cannot lose sight of. Mr. Carnegie is the first man to set up a ladder in Pittsburgh by which we may climb, if we will, above the clouds of smoke and out of the noise of hammers." Pittsburgh has been steadily making that ascent, and to a man of artistic proclivities it is one of the most interesting spots in the world. Joseph Pennell rightly pounced upon it as rich in subjects for the drawings that he loved to make, showing "the wonder of work." The steel-mills alone constitute an extraordinary lure. But I have found the place sympathetic in many ways. For one thing Pittsburgh occupies a site, hilly and river-bound, that is unique in its romantic picturesqueness. Where anything like the same conditions exist in Europe people travel hundreds of miles to see them. Of course the Pittsburgher who has no use for Carnegie's ladder has done his best to ruin the natural beauty of this Pennsylvanian stronghold. As your taxi takes you from the railway-station up a glorious ramp, rising in prodigious length to a prodigious height, you are happy for a mo

ment looking over the valley with the flare of the mills in the foreground and myriad twinkling lights beyond. But in another moment you are whelmed in distress because as you rise you are confronted by the most diabolical array of huge advertising signs that I have ever seen anywhere. Year after year over a long period I have gone to Pittsburgh to see the International, and year after year I have blenched before the awfulness of those signs. There is the ramp, a portentous asset by itself, a stretch of grandeur that any city here or abroad might envy, and for lack of adequate protection it is disfigured beyond belief. Yet, as I say, Pittsburgh is to me a wonderfully sympathetic place to visit. After all, you do emerge from that fiendish gantlet and presently you approach the ladder.

YOU approach it under varying lights.

Sometimes at night when one of the mills is going at full blast the sky is filled over an immense area with the loveliest imaginable rosy conflagration. But I like the daylight, too. Often it is merely cold and gloomy, but there are other days when even fairly strong sunshine is tempered by the smoke and then a very beguiling softness touches the atmosphere. A pleasant place is Pittsburgh, and nowhere pleasanter than at the Institute, where they are mounting the ladder in throngs. It would be interesting to explore in detail that hive of ambitious industry. I have peered through the glass door of a little sound-proof room and caught a glimpse of a student sawing away at his cello. There are many such cubicles. I have watched other students setting the stage in their theatre, and I have gone from a class in one art to a class in another. But I must resist the temptation to traverse them all. I note their activity here only to indicate the environment of the International. On