Advocate Reviewed by Prof. Toy

Questions of student life occupy a prominent place in the Advocate of January 26. The article on the Student Council is a clear and forcible statement of the purposes and functions of that organization, and should do much to commend it to the student body and thus help to secure for it a high degree of efficiency. There is also a cordial word of welcome to the newly elected President of the University, with suggestions as to the policy he should adopt; but perhaps it will be as well to reserve such suggestions till he shall have taken his seat as president. There will be doubtless a general approval of the editorial plea for the study of poetry as literature; such study, the article properly adds, will not be open to the charge of dilettantism if it rests on a basis of sound philological and historical scholarship. The Advocate hopes to see justice done Poe when the Puritan shall have passed--but why shall not justice be done him now? In fact there is a suggestion of Poe in "The Cat and the Mouse"--an effective story, with some thing of Poe's grim despair and situations full of horror; the tone is different from Poe's, but a result like his is gained. In "Will Ellis" a situation is described in which a tragedy is inevitable--the passionate protest of an ignorant mountaineer against the invasion of his domain by a railway; the tragedy comes quite naturally. "A romance in red" is an anecdote, full of quiet humor, with an undercurrent of sadness. All three of these stories have the quality of realness--an encouraging fact. The poetical pieces have refinement of feeling, but none of them will take strong hold on the reader; "Gulls" is the best, but they all lack definiteness and force. The reviews of Dobson's "De libris," Wendell's "Privileged Classes" and Graham's "Wind Among the Willows," though short, are to the point.