Professor Santayana on the Lampoon.

Two ways of becoming funny are well illustrated by the two editorials in the current number of the Lampoon. One way is to turn convention into farce and the other to turn it into frank veracity. The first editorial considers how the advice recently asked for from undergraduates about ways of improving courses might be given next time not by A and B men, but by their "alphabetically interior brothren." The second editorial espigates the Freshman, already sore with promiscuous good advice, and warns him not to make his life "a giddy wheel of irresponsibility with its centre in the Hub." It may be a personal prejudice but fancy seems to me more delightful when it plays about actual facts than when it cuts loose from them and becomes purely fantastic. In the former case there seems to be a more genuine pleasure left over and you feel amused without feeling cheated.

The number also contains the usual By-the-Way some further account of Freshman innocence, an English conference with a personal flavor, and a patter of amusing short jokes. The drawings vary from extreme decision where they are decorative to extreme indecision where they are meant to be satirical. It is chiefly in this matter of caricature, and in the verse, that a certain weakness makes itself felt. Wit and humor have a narrow field in a College paper, but a very propitious one, since in College every one is or ought to be merry and everything has a right to seem somewhat novel and absurd. Let us hope the class of 1905, after furnishing the Lampoon with a lawful but will furnish it with a Howarth or two and one or two Herricks, to catch the momentary sparkle of our small world.