The "Advocate"

Begins with a striking piece of blank verse, which seems a new departure in college poetry; follow the editorials, exceptionally strong and much to the point. A very amusing story, "Aloft on the Dorothy Bell," comes next, and then a selection of Daily Themes. "At Night-Time" is a somewhat dog gerel rendering of a German poem. Next is an essay on "Count Tolstoi and Modern Realism," in which the writer, after saying that Balzac tried to crush the life out of French prose - Balzac, the one man to me who can understand and describe the emotions of a woman - that the French revolution "overthrew in one vast ruin Church, State and literature," in which latter word seems to be included not only Montesquieu, Voltaire and J. J. Rousseau, who, by the way, led the revolution, but also the German writers, Lessing. Schiller, Goethe. The latter, I may add, like the later English writers, seems to have drawn much inspiration from that same overthrow - after saying all this, proceeds to evolve Victor Hugo and Theophile Gautier from the paltry revolution of 1830, and from these all the other French writers from Zola to Daudet, the American realist and Tolstoi, which latter, after a pun on the word art, he proceeds to magnify at the expense of Daudet and Zola and Miss Austen. Because much of the experience of Zola and his contemporaries is of the gutter, much of their writing smacks of the slum, but is it the less true on that account? Because Miss Austen follows her creations with the minuteness and relentlessness of providence, is she necessarily false? It has been said that only one language can be thoroughly mastered by any one, and as the style is the man, so the language is the nation. No one can be a cosmopolitan writer; the world is too wide and too complex; not Sophocles, not Victor Hugo, and certainly not Tolstoi. To cut short this essay, this story seems rather inaccurate and a little labored.

Sing song verse intervenes, and then comes an article entitled "Old London Streets," the first, I am glad, to see of a series. The description is vivid in spite of awkward wording; the essay good in spite of abrupt ending, Book notices, the Items and the Brief end a number of which the editorialsa re the best part.