BRIGHT AND DULL SPOTS ARE SHOWN IN ADVOCATE

The following review of the February number of the Advocate was written for the Crimson by W. G. Rice, Instructor and Tutor in the department of English.

The February number of the Advocate contains a fair portion of thoughtful and entertaining writing. The pages to which most readers at Harvard will first turn are those devoted to Mr. Donald Gibbs' "Sawdust Trails in the College"--a kind of "apologia", it may be conjectured, for a recent remark which attained a wider currency than its author intended. Mr. Gibbs' subject is the 'student conference' which too often reaches, in the name of a free discussion of educational problems, no higher result than the training up of the student delegates who attend toward a "future of fair Rotarian godliness"; and he treats it with a lively, slightly vitriolic pen, and the authority of one who has suffered the boredom and sense of fuitility that such meetings induce. Mr. Gibbs makes out an impressive case; but his presentation of it might be more effective still if he were wholly possessed by the Comic Spirit which would preserve his equanimity entire while he looked upon the spectacle of others' absurdity.

Besides the "Sawdust Trail" stands, in immediate local interest, the editorial wherein Pegasus reveals himself shaking his intelligent head doubtfully in meditation upon the probable results of an adoption of the rumored proposal to shorten the terms of lectures in the college year. The rest of the editorial columns are filled by the engaging Leander Snipe, who writes from upper New York State to recount the unfortunate falling out between those pillars of the Advocate's staff in other years, W. D. Edmonds and Essenz von Biershaum. Leanaer's letter has in it more life and warmth than any of the fiction to be found elsewhere in the magazine. H. W. Bragdon's "1000 Leagues to Spain" easily takes first honors among the stories and demonstrates again that young writers are likely to do their best work when they devote themselves earnestly to the understanding and delineation of character rather than to the framing of elaborate plots. Montgomery Higginson's "The Word of a Friend" builds up with tolerable success the form of Bill the college waster, but fails dismally in the denounement which is designated to dispose of him; and Francis Fawsett's "Fisherman's Luck", in spite of occasional bright phrases, shows neither wit enough to redeem the broad burlesque in the lay figures of Waterly Meadows and Sir Tenterhook Weathervane nor invention enough to cover the threadbare situation in which these persons take part.

The verse is in the main respectable. Haven Hubbard's "Since you have Waned from Us" touches the chord of sentimental melancholy gently and sweetly. Mr. Riche's "To One Who Goes into the Night" has simple tenderness and sincerity. Phillip Hitchborn's "Foam-White", equally neat in its versification, falls however, to escape artificiality, and James Thomas Flexner's "Resurrection" does not reach the maturity of though and emotion which the subject demands.