NEW ADVOCATE OUT TODAY

There is room at Harvard for a student publication that will avoid subjects such as "The Quintessence of Kant," and prefer to dwell upon the less important, but far more hearty and genial, actualities of academic life. Though the Advocate has often ventured upon the deep waters of university learning, and withdrawn from them with no little credit, the true role of the journal undoubtedly lies in portraying the amiable customs of college existence; in hearkening to the murmurs of our miniature world, and its ideas, its little struggles, its trials and successes. The new issue of the Advocate lives up to this hitherto half-comprehended ideal, and presents an interesting and refreshing number.

The critical contributions include the editorials, an article "A New Harvard Movement" by Mr. J. R. Sibley, and a number of dramatic criticisms. The editorials, if we exclude the fortnightly attack on the ringing of the seven o'clock bell, are unusually good, and the one entitled "An Opportunity" urges its suggestions so ably that one wishes that it might have been written in the days of the Advocate's past before some of the Harvard architecture had been called into its dreadful being. Mr. Sibley's paper outlines a method of spreading Harvard influence through the West without seeming unpleasantly officious. The play reviews are decidedly entertaining, but unequal, and in each case the reviewer has curiously reflected the actual language of the performance he witnessed. Thus the language of the reviews of "The Blue Bird" and of "Kathleen Ni Hoolihan" approaches critical dignity, while the dialect of the reviews of the musical comedies suggests the influence of comic opera lyrics. Mr. McMahon's letter on "The Playboy" capably presents one side of the discussion that has risen over that drama.

The two anecdotes, serving as contributions of fiction, are the merest amiable trifles, though Mr. Peterson's work again declares his rare faculty of careful observation of outer nature and of personal emotion. In "Lost at Sea" Mr. Gilkey has wasted his finished metrical technique and his vivid sense of the rhythm of blank verse upon an incoherent story of a poetical cabin boy marooned upon a desert island by an ogre-like sea captain. Had the poem been long enough to admit of an explanation of the captain's hatred, the narrative might at least have seemed possible, but in the present clipped state of the poem horrid event follows horrid event without any logical sequence.

Let there not be too much cavilling. The number has originality and talent, and it is the duty of the editors to bring these qualities to their highest development.