THE FOREFINGER OF A SAINT

Occasionally, in hunting a back number of the "Manchester Guardian" for History 12 or looking up the "Revue des Mondes", a student misses his way in Widener and finds himself not among the Periodicals but in the Treasure Room. The name connotes musty manuscript and faded antiques, and few but the bewildered individual above ever venture to stray inside. For those who do, however, the sensation of the discovery is like the delight of a mediaeval forebear, who, after journeying across a continent succeeds in handling the forefinger of a saint.

We said handle the forefinger of a saint, but glass cases stand between us and the ancient treasures like the impassable ether between Heaven and Hell. There they are, the immortals; Chaucer: the magistrates arresting John Bunyan (see, they present the warrant to him now): Cromwell somewhere behind his death mask (we feel secretly glad that he is, indeed, dead); and many others vaguely peeping through the pages of books. Did you know that the fastidious John Dryden was once a boy, went to a grammar school, actually scrawled his name in a Greek copy book with large letters; and, not content with that, scribbled all the way down the margin setting it off in squares just as some of our young aspirants do here at Harvard. Nor are the editors on the Advocate the only fellows who have ever corrected their manuscripts: Voltaire's "Mahomet" looks like a blue book in an English A final.

"What are they reading?" you ask. Geniuses, you know, are often made up of the queerest elements. The amorous book, "L'academie des Philosophes sur l'amour"; belonged to what court lady? No lady at all but to the staid Montesquieu, that man whose works Professor Munro always recommends but which no undergraduate has ever read. Perhaps that wary looking volume, which the card describes as "Etat des troupes et des etats-major des places"--once wholted the stern glance of Richelieu. It was Madame de Pompadour's and she, upon receiving it from His Majesty, probably placed it among her perfumed volumes never to be opened. There is another book which I know must have been opened and not only opened but read "The Anatomy of Melancholy". Who ever read that book? Boswell, and we believe he actually did invert a bottle for three nights successively in the hope of driving away a wart.

We must not overlook the poets. The author of the "Ode On the Intimations", etc.--what did he read in his off moments for inspiration? Alas, we guessed wrong. Wordsworth's own name is neatly penned on the title page of "Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England for the Last Hundred Years." We could expect C. Lamb, who was a poet after all, to read Euripides, and Milton is always Milton except when he writes in the guest book of an Italian nobleman: "if virtue feebly were, etc., Joannes Miltonius.

The early prayer books of New England and the Harvard histories fill us with desire to handle the scared relics. Those were the days when nobody roomed on the Gold Coast; those were the times when Richard Walach stopped at Mr. Holmes' and Josiah Mood lodges at Mrs. Quibbs'. Why is it that Increase Mather's Bible is two inches thicker than any other extant Bible? Perhaps you already know that Increase Mather's ghost rapped a Freshman soundly on the knuckles for accidentally pulling out a musical comedy program with his handkerchief while bending over the pious manuscripts.