EIGHT O'CLOCK CHAPEL. By Cornelius H. Patton and Walter T. Field Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. $3.50.

THIS year as well as last saw literary representations of nineteenth century decades at a rate almost epidemic. Don Marquis wrote of the adventurous business enterprises of the seventies. "The Mauve Decade" summed up, falsely, some aver, the social life of the nineties, and Mark Sullivan with the "Turn of the Century" said his say on the politics and public fashions of those days. The present book has a rather more restricted field than any of these, and yet is of them, for it treats of the days when New England was admittedly the cultural balance wheel of the nation, when her colleges were, by common consent, deemed the fittest heirs of old world learnedness and worthy, by virtue of this, to new world respect.

"Eight O'Clock Chapel" is a cryptic title for a volume of comments on teachers, students, buildings, standards, and customs in New England institutions during the eighties. The famous teachers as well as the famous buildings, moreover, are accorded the honour of illustrations, which are quite prolific in the book. The buildings qualify because of age, the men because their names, even to present day ears, ring very familar, though most are gone. The number of these familiar names is a partial justification of the book itself, a reminders that, although then as always a small puddle, New England served as the habitat of many large frogs. Hazing, dining, studying, and athletics, together with instances of curious customs from the Berkshire colleges as well as from New Haven, Providence or Cambridge undergo each its narration in a style that combines many of the features of a collection of anecdotes and a director of past notables.

There is a little time, obviously, in a work where interesting detail so predominates, to discuss minutely the theories of education maintained and the methods used by the well-known masters. Rather, with the name of each man, is told the works he brought forth, the extent of his note and authority in the nation at large, and his popularity with the students or perhaps, his reserve. His campus hick name, his mannerisms, his students form the mainstay of the biographical portions of the narrative. Nevertheless, in speaking of Eliot, of Wendell of Charles Eliot Norton and of others like these, it was impossible to omit all reference to their educational tenets to refrain from mentioning the main features of their best known theories and methods.

The diffusion, itself, of such a mass of detail is not, however, without its own attractiveness. It but leaves the reader to share the work of artistry and from his knowledge of the subject covered, to select his own entertainment. Alumni will find the descriptions of men they knew and mention of comments and characterizations they may themselves have made or heard. Undergraduates will find the roots of many traditions and the sense of the dignity and aristocratic nature of academic work, which is even yet a part of the New England atmosphere.