College Graduates in Literature.

Following are several interesting paragraphs taken from an article in the Boston Advertiser on the number of college graduates as compared with the number of those not college graduates in literature:

"It can confidently be affirmed that the proportion of non-collegiate men in the lists of authorship is greater to-day than it was in that indefinite period known as 'before the war.' Making a list hastily of well-known authors, setting their names down as they occur to us, it appears that Irving, Poe, Cooper and Whittier are almost the only names of men of the first rank who did not have a college education. Bryant began a college course, but was compelled to discontinue it. Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, Willis, Prescott, Bancroft. Motley, the two Danas, were all college men.

In taking men of the latter generation, and recognising the conspicuous rather than the eminent as a basis for judgment, the college men are Parkman, Warner, Lodge, Fiske, various Adamses, Hale, Higginson, White, Story, Cranch, Scudder, Leland, DeForest, Curtis, Norton, J. F. Clarke, Ripley; Stedman offsets Bryant as coming between the two classes. Of non-college men a larger number may readily be named, Walt, Whitman, Whipple, Trowbridge, Fields, Parton, Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, Eggleston, Harte, Howells, James, Aldrich, Lathrop, Stockton, Piatt, Cable, Crawford, Fawcett, Gilder, Harris, Carleton, Mark Twain, Burroughs. It is possible that some name has been put in one or the other of these lists on the wrong side, but there can be no considerable error, and any one can add to either list according to his own judgment without materially disturbing the balance.

To test the matter in another way, the catalogue of the publishing firm was taken, which is recognized as publishing the most representative list of American books. Here strictly professional books were ruled out, and the authors divided into two classes, the dead and the living. Of the dead there are forty-two names. Ten, or less than one-fourth were not college men. Of the living, we count 133 names. Fifty-one, or more than one third, are not college men. Of course, this cannot be called a scientific test, yet it approximates such a test, and shows with tolerable force the ranks of literature are recruited from the men who do not go to college far more than was the case in former days.

The general explanation of this state of things may be found in the change of conditions, by which the whole body of the community has been raised by educational processes. Formerly there was scarcely anything which could be called education except among those who were in college or preparing to enter college. Now, the common school and high school courses open so much more learning to boys, that there is a far larger class out of which literary men are likely to rise. Formerly, at least in New England, any boy who showed an aptitude for books was pretty sure to be encouraged to prepare for college. The educated men were the picked men of the community. This is no longer the case, and many circumstances prevented a boy from taking a college course which do not prevent him from entering a literary-career.

It is a commentary on the wider range of occupation which is naturally open to college men, that aptitude for literature in some form among alumni is readily diverting into business channels. A census of the publishing house to whose catalogue we have referred having been taken, it was found that of the twenty-eight men in the counting rooms, above the rank of errand boy, nine, or almost one-third, are college graduates. The college, it seems, is reinforcing literature in other ways than those which are strictly the ways of authorship."