THE MAIN STREAM. By Stuart Sherman. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 1926. $2.50.

THERE are two types of the literary college professor: the stodgy ones who edit, say, the works of George Lillo with compendious notes, of whom all college students have seen far too many specimens, and the sprightly ones who pride themselves on keeping up with the latest vagaries of the inexplicably unscholastic. Stuart, Sherman was one of the best of the second type a man whom Illinois University students revered as if he had been a combination of Doctor Johnson, Barrett Wendell and William Lyon Phelps, and whose directing of the Herald-Tribune Book Review endeared him to that dreadfully class conscious clan, the New York writing fraternity.

This book is made up of his last critical essays, book reviews of the jaunty type that let you in on the book's title only in the third paragraph. The College will see there things on Dean Briggs and on Professor Abbott's "The New Barbarians". The general reader will share with the College a potpourri of Dreiser, Thoreau, Anatole France, de la Mare, Lardner, and Montaigne. Mr. Sherman's tastes were notoriously catholic; and here he shows, regrettably for the last time, an ability to be all things to all men that is as refreshing as note worthy.

The trouble is (and this book does leave the reader with a troubled feeling) that although Mr. Sherman's knowledge of things past and contemporary was admirable, his capacity for facile applause is much less so. The reader suspects that he had so many tastes that at bottom he had none at all. The two places where he makes an attempt at any kind of distinguishing, in preferring Esther Shephard's "Paul Bunyan" to James Stephens', and in protesting against Dreiser's fearful style, are too obvious to argue any great subtlety. Elsewhere he is prone to sit back, fold his hands comfortably over his stomach and say: "Great, absolutely great! Do go on!" by the hour together. He does not like everything else he treats--but almost, and it cannot be possible for any one man to find so many new books that he likes so well in a short three years.

Until "The Main Stream" cloys, however, it is interesting; and Mr. Sherman's admirers can always take the benefit of the statute: "De Mortuis--"