Review of Advocate by Dean Briggs

This time at least the Advocate is not careering through space remote from College life; it is a local paper dealing with Harvard questions old and new. The editors pay their respects to the Polo Club, the lecture system, the assistants in English A, and the buyers of printed notes. Two of the five prose articles attack in the good old way weak spots in our methods of instruction, and one shows how alcohol gradually drowns college ideals. Of the two poems, the longer may be called academic.

That the Advocate should attack things is altogether healthy, provided the attacks are straightforward. In discussing methods of instruction, no undergraduate can be thoroughly informed; but every undergraduate has the advantage of being one of those at whom instruction is aimed, and can judge pretty accurately whether or not it hits him. What he cannot judge is the difficulty of the shot. Both Mr. Ross and Mr. Angell write earnestly, and Mr. Angell comes to a conclusion arrived at by a committee of the Faculty long ago--that there is too much lecturing for the outside work which the lectures demand. On the other hand, it is possible to overdo long personal conferences and "small meetings." They may, even more than lectures, explain what the student should discover for himself; and they may require of the professor more hours a day than the day contains. President Eliot is said to have observed that the trouble with the Garfield theory of Mark Hopkins and the log is "in finding enough Mark Hopkinses to go round."

"Hiram Mitchell's Dream," by T. S. R., is a well-told story of presentiment and panic. Hiram's dialect needs mending: the man who says "Them things goes" does not say "It's only a dream," but rather "It ain't only a dream" or "It ain't nothin' but a dream."

"The Evolution of an Ideal" is a well conceived and respectably executed comment on the vulgarizing of men between twenty and forty. "Waiter Number 17," the only story of dazzlingly improper life in the whole number, is not powerful enough for the tragedy it contains.

Of the verse, Mr. Sheahan contributes a musical little song; Mr. Aiken a bold monologue. The latter poem shows no slight mastery of blank verse and considerable imaginative power.

A withering book review concludes this interesting number.