Advocate Reviewed by Prof. Moore

The Advocate this week is made up of a half-dozen pieces of fiction and as many experiments in verse. The stories, with one exception, are of men and things out of doors--by-products, perhaps, of vacation; one is told by a stagedriver, one by a guide, and one is a trapper's tale of long ago. The first two are "bear stories," and do not belie their kind. Rude men, of uncouth speech spiced with damns and tobacco juice; tell of beasts of fabulous dimensions and behavior, without fear of the "malleus naturfakerorum." Like other patterns for stories, this can be repeated to monotony. In "Autumn in the Forest," Mr. Edgell reproduces the sights he "photographed in his mind for future reference"; but, if I may pursue the figure, the retouching shows too much--nature does not willingly submit to being written up. His story, "Eb. Demming's Coon Hunt," is clever, and the dialect has greater verisimilitude than we commonly look for in such things. The defective who turns out to be more of a man than was expected figures also in "Jean and the Rabbit-Jules," and in Mr. Barber's "Club-foot Joe." He is as much one of the stock characters of the woods story as the rascally slave of Latin comedy; but three appearances in one week is overworking him, and the reader would sympathize if he struck. Mr. Ashwell writes of a day's fishing in Devon, in which he found sober English trout properly shy of big and gaudy American flies; but the discovery has not chastened his adjectives. The propensity to fine phrases is the besetting temptation of many college writers--not the exuberance of fancy which is attributed to youth, but the exuberance of dictionary which makes some fashionable authors intolerable. There is one parlor story, "Cupid's Ladder," by Mr. W. C. Greene, which leaves the hero proposing to the wrong sister, but does not inspire in us any curiosity to know what came of it. We are curious, however, to know why he four times addresses the lady as "Madamoiselle." Spelling is, I fear, a neglected branch of literature; the majority are "Laodecian," in that particular, as we read on another page. A Senior meditates, "more senforum," on the changes he has seen and some he would like to see. There is an editorial note commendatory of the Student Council, a word in memory of Professor Norton, and a short review of a new book by Mr. Galsworthy.

Of the verse, Mr. Pulsifer's "Palace of Heart's Desire" is distinctly the best in conception and expression. "The West Today is a dithyramb, and rises at moments to dithyrambic unintelligibility, as in the first line, "Land that the lakes have brided." The lingling anapests of "Morituri Salutamus" seem fitter to "Here's a health to King Charles" than to the bleeding and tearful gladiator. "Jealousy" is an aptly turned conceit in four lines; and "Will of the Wisp" has a good second stanza.