A PEN FOR THE SPHINX

When Thomas Jefferson was through being president he retired to his country place in Virginia and took up his pen to continue influencing the country's history. President Grant stove off the fatal hand of cancer until his famous Memoirs were completed. Literary work alone would be enough to insure the fame of Theodore Roosevelt's name. Tomorrow morning Calvin Coolidge carries the tradition into Mr. Hearst's Cosmopolitan Magazine.

That the nation will find the Cosmopolitan an adequate successor to the late White House spokesman is some-what questionable. Somehow the "quality group" rather than the "quantity group" of magazines--but Mr. Coolidge may always choose for himself. One thing, however, is certain, the former chief executive is going into print. His way of doing it is fully in keeping with a certain democratic spirit of the times, a way that insures Mr. Coolidge reaching a considerable mass of his recent supporters. But there is about it all something that suggests less the literary debut of a former president than the vaudeville tour of a returned channel swimmer.