Advocate Reviewed by Dr. Maynadier

"The Advocate is glad to welcome, discuss and criticise any literary effort of a Harvard undergraduate. That it offers an encouraging and instructive field to the man who likes to dip pen in ink, is its only claim to usefulness.

So the first number of the Advocate for the current academic year modestly states the aim of the paper. Commendable, this, and admirable, were sufficient emphasis put on the word "Instructive." But the current number is likely to make a graduate at least fear that the editors of the advocate do not subject undergraduate articles to sufficiently severe criticism to furnish their authors much real instruction in the art of writing. More than half of the sixteen pages of the present paper deserve praise solely for general, but not invariable, correctness of style (while after all should be taken for granted in any paper of any good college) and for pleasant, honest feeling. Otherwise they are mediocre.

Of the verse only "Vistas," by John Hall Wheelock, attains distinction. Four or five of its eight lines are very good. It makes you wish that Mr. Wheelock had tried to be similarly concise in his other verses, "For a Book of Poems," for even the fourteen lines of a sonnet are more than he needs for the expression of his thought.

The Advocate's prose begins with some commonplace, and fortunately also common-sense, words of the editors to Freshmen. Then it rambles through Mr. Ford's "Varied Outlooks," which are so very varied that few readers will know what the author wishes them to see. It is better in Mr. Edward Sheldon's "Among Those Sailing." There are good things in the story; but the hero and heroine, probably unlike any lovers who ever lived that were worth their salt, stop in their mutual declaration of love to compare themselves with Mr. and Mrs. Browning. Mr. Rogers MacVeagh's "Anonymously Dedicated" is a better story,--the fiction in the present Advocate that the reader is most likely to remember. Readable, too, but more conventional, is "The C. M." by "Gregorious."

One article only remains to be mentioned: Mr. Paul Davis's "Things that Remind You." There is too much exaggeration in the rambling little essay--especially at the end, which the writer no doubt thought more humorous than it is; but there is also shrewd and accurate observation of human nature. It has individuality than any other piece in the present Advocate.