FORMER PEGASUS FINDS FAMILIAR PATHS WIND ABOUT NEW ADVOCATE

The following review of the Advocate was written by Ralph Porhoet, '86, former Pegasus of the Advocate.

The pleasant thing about a department store, so business men tells us, is that if imported lamp-shades and other fripperies fall to sell, the boots and dresses and draperies will pay the rent; and if such staples are less in demand one month than another, the fripperies, on the other hand, may well serve to keep the woll from the owner's Italio-Greco-Romanesque facade. The Advocate has profited by by this axiom of the trade, and in the last two years has built up a study skeleton of departments--editorials, book-reviews, the special article, and the rest that insures a certain variety to any issue, whatever the quality of the accidental "contributions" may be. As your reviewer galloped through the April number of the Advocate, the track, in the main, seemed to him rather trodden and the same, but there loomed up every few rods the pleasantly familiar obstacles that bade him take breath and hold had for a bracing rise.

Mr. Bingham, in his feature article "Athletic Problems", demonstrate a weakness for the clitorises amiable indeed in a Director of Athletics, and discusses with a pleasant sanity the history and place of the Committee on the Regulation of Sports. He quotes from the recent resolution passed by the Committee "that! it is, therefore, Harvard's policy . . . to play football with other collegest only at suitable intervals", and points out urbanely that this policy is by no means "exclusive", and that we would be exclusive if we insisted on playing the same institutions year after year", that "it simply asserts that we prefer to play the game as a same." The Editors, in their own page, chime in an active higher, and berate in a few semi-quavers the easy chair athletes whose howls mingle lugubriously with the dally chronicles of arson, murder, and adultery in the columns of New York and Boston journals.

Mr. Brewster's story, "The Chimney", featured on the cover, demands more attention than its slightness would seem to warrant. Although the writer has managed to introduce, in three pages, a leering wink, beef-stew, fornication, apple-pie, a bastard child, a curly maple bed, a drunken farmer, and twins, the result hardly justifies the material. It is only fair to add, however, that one of the twins died. In "Hero-Worship", Mr. Coolidge loosely strings together four anecdotes, told in a straightforward manner that redeems them from what might become fatuity in less steady hands. This is followed by a snatch of song from the lips of Mr. H. M. Parker, Junior, which gives your reviewer an opportunity to sit back for a moment and indulge in stroking his beard and reminiscence.

If the April number is any criterion, the matter of verse now receives less attention that it used to. "Along the Sky" and "Thetis" water a bit, and all though Mr. Abbott is as ever in "Les Papilions de Nuit", one might hint that here, too Pegasus feels the weight of the dictionary.

Read "Half-way Through the Looking-Glass", in which Mr. Marfield throws down his glove to Mr. Chesterton--and runs: and "The Transfiguration of Mr. Weatherhead", which is Mr. Page's chronicle of a French instructor who was neither circumflex nor acute. The remarkable effusion of Anthony Featherstone may be of less interest to some than it is to your reviewer, who knows poor Tony well at college, and who respectfully begs to differ with Mr. Kay's comments on "He Who Believeth". The book-reviews are pleasantly undignified, and Mr. Howe calls Elmer Gantry a nasty old thing and Paul Cocleau the Adolphe Menjou of literature with equal grace. The tilt at the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, by Mr. Abbott, begins with a gloriously mixed metaphor and goes right on being funny. It is pleasant to read The Man with a Briar again. He was another of my classmates, at college, and I see be is as full of windy random as over.