SEES GREAT CHANGE IN ADVOCATES ATTITUDE

tives and adverbs that the high point does not break through sharply. John Finley Jr. writes interestingly in the "Memoirs of Captain Wottlebottle" about a land where the people regard as religion just what we regard as despicable baseness, yet where they fail so generally to live up to their religion that their life, all in all, turns out to be very much the same as our own. Burke Boyce discusses with the essayist's amiability some of the romance of browsing in Cambridge bookshops and finding second-hand textbooks which bear interesting marginal annotations. Charles Allen Smart contributes some sketches under the title of "The Midle West Again"; and Edwin K. Merrill argues in hot desperation for a modified Volstead Act.

Verse Is Superior to Prose

Although the entire magazine is interesting, the verse impresses me as being better than the prose. Dudley Fitts Jr. contributes a joyful "Ode to Anne", "who demanded a piece in the jazzy measure." Mr. Fitts possesses feeling for metrical movement, and a blessed sense of the ridiculous. In "An Invective Against Poets", Merle Colby, with pleasant banter, calls upon the rhymers to tell where they have ever seen this beauty about which they sing in sweetened notes. Pertinex writes in his sonnets about "Inspiration"; Whitney Cromwell writes with a pleasant absence of gravity about "Reading an Obituary". George P. Ludlam speaks in a serious poetic style in "Illustrating a Persian Mosaic". Theodore Hope writes briefly on "Nightfall"; and Charles Allen Smart contributes a rondel, "I Mounted Joy at Eventide."

An officer of the University once remarked that the Harvard Advocate was published regularly, but that he had never heard of anybody who read it. At a time when the contributions were in large measure only acceptable themes prepared for college courses, there might have been good reason for the remark. But today anyone who does not unreasonably demand of undergraduates the perfection of established writers, ought to read the magazine with genuine relish.