LIMERICKS--AND LIMERICKS

Mr. Langford Reed is one of the modern wonders of the world. After plowing through sixteen thousand limericks in preparing his forthcoming book, "The Complete Limerick," he still clings nobly to his original conviction that there are enough decent limericks to fill a book--George Eernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and others to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Reed is courageous; but, although his volume is not yet on sale; it is a good wager that the average of his selections will fall considerably below the poetic level of those delectable lines on "The Young Plumber of Leigh", which Mr. Bennett, if correctly quoted in the international book Review, puts forward as his favorites.

Just as the form of the sonnet seems to lend itself to reflections on love and beauty, so does the very lift and swing of the limericks suggest ideas which would be absolutely impossible on the printed page. One cannot imagine Tennyson producing limericks Or Milton. The thought is revolving. On the other hand, the conjunction of Rabelais and blank verse is equally incongruous.

Still, in the face of almost insuperable obstacles, Langford Reed seems to have produced a book. As he must be laboring under many difficulties in planning the second volume, it might not be out of place to mention for his benefit the other innocuous verse, the one about the young fellow named Young, who once when his nerves were unstrung, put his mother, unseen in the sausage machine, and canned her and labelled her "Tongue".