Review of Current Advocate

A lukewarm editorial, a half-baked leading article, three uneven experiments in verse, and four ingenious, trivial stories--the answer, we trust is not too obviously: Advocate. And yet some such formula as this, it seems, would frequently apply. The current issue, at any rate, is not above mediocrity. Not that the contributors always lack ideas; in two cases at least subjects of importance are broached, on which undergraduate opinion just now is desirable. The real trouble seems to be that the work is not carefully thought to or logically arranged, and that the product of an idle moment as allowed, without revision, to creep into print. Under such circum stances the business of the reviewer is all too tame, for he must point out blunders which the writers themselves might easily have rectified.

The editorial, which maintains that the present students are required to write too many theses, fails in general to strike home, and almost entirely loses points when the author commits himself to the folly that illiteracy should be corrected only in English A.

Still more noticeable is this infirmity of thought in the article by F. S. entitled, "The Rich Man's Burden." With a stimulating subject in his hands--the chance of more and more inducing the foremost young men of the country to become teachers--the writer lapses into incoherence, leaving with the reader but one definite impression, that the profession of teaching "should be recruited from the rich."

Of the experiments in verse "Destiny" by H. T. Pulsifer shows perhaps the most promise. The conclusion, however, even while having a good conceit, is sustained only by a rather obvious invoking of the Deity. The remaining two contributions are in the nature of vers de societe, and verse of this sort except when exquisitely done always means so much more to the writer than to the reader that criticism is unprofitable.

The four short stories scarcely merit individual notice. Two of them are fairly flat, and the most that need be said of the other two, "The Murderer," and "The Villa Blashka," is that they keep us from forgetting, by their gratuitous recourse to the unusual, that a Poe centenary has just come and gone