That is why the sound of "critical clamors" should be a very cheering one especially if it come not in shrill falsetto but in a good rich baritone.

Any reader who became confused in the stack-room of the New York Public Library and chanced upon the first issue of THE BOOKMAN, published in February, 1895, would come upon this rather timely paragraph:

"Professor Bryce's 'American Commonwealth' has fallen under the Censor's ban in Russia, where its sale is prohibited."

One marvels that so much could have happened to a country and still leave it in the same frame of mind. Lord Bryce on America is probably no more popular in Bolsheviki quarters than he was to the oligarchs of 1895.

If this bit of contemporary gossip led to an extended excursion through the first few numbers of THE BOOKMAN, the effect would be to retouch with emphasis that very lively impression one had of the magazine under the hand of Harry Thurston Peck. His swivel chair swept the horizon and it was set upon a sufficient eminence to see things afar off. In the third number one finds him asserting with confidence that the author of the then anonymous "Joan of Arc", running in "Harper's", was none other than Mark Twain.

The effect on the mind of browsing through these issues of twenty-three years ago is the curiously contradictory one of the futility of mere success on the one hand and the essential continuity of all writing on the other. In the many pages crowded with news of new works, momentarily big sales and important authors, how few are the names and titles that are more

than names and titles to-day! And yet there are a few.

It is amusing to read an announcement of a "semi-erotic novel on the New Woman." It is several removes from the "semi" days to psychoanalytic fiction, and the New Woman has matured to such a degree that she is positively old with the wisdom of political government.

If the reader immured in the stackroom had the time to explore, he would find much to-do in the early BookMAN about Barry and Crockett, Lucas Malet, W. B. Yeats and Turgenieff; Ibsen, Thomas Hardy and Bill Nye; Louise Guiney and Father Tabb, Brander Matthews and H. C. Bunner; Oliver Optic, Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Alice Brown, Andrew Lang, Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard; Anthony Hope, Rudyard Kipling and George Gissing; George Saintesbury, Zangwill and Howells; Brunetière and Arthur Sherburne Hardy. These are some of the names that occupied the attention of the world twenty-three years ago. How efficient is time!

How ironical, too. We read in the first issue of THE BOOKMAN that the Baroness von Sutter, the authoress of the Peace novel, "Waffen Nieder", is an active member of a Peace Society which "links its objects with those of the various Peace Societies of Eu rope." A magazine published for the same ends "is largely made up of translations from English and German modern writers in whose work the note of 'universality' is sounded." Thus early was Prussia gently rocking the cradle of the world to a peace lullaby. We know so much more about the "universality" of German Peace Societies to-day than they did in those days.

!

In a recent interview some statements are attributed to Sara Teasdale about the value of having everybody his own poet. She says:

"The writing of poems should be considered as natural and simple as the writing of letters. Children should make up poems without the slightest embarrassment, and the time spent in school in writing their own poems would be better spent than that consumed in learning arithmetic. Poetry is the most democratic of the arts, because no money is needed for long special training in learning how to compose it. It is the best antidote for the morbid repression that many of us have inherited from generations of Puritan ancestors. When everybody writes his own poems, twothirds of the misery of the world will flow away singing, like ice-locked rivers when the spring sets in."

Of course it may be argued with a good deal of reason that poetry is no more democratic than dancing, singing or prose-writing. What is much more to the point is that the writing of it, like the practise of any other art, can hardly be done to any real purpose without a knowledge of first principles. Unfortunately these are born in but one or two in each generation.

Few children probably could exchange to advantage a knowledge of arithmetic for the privilege of covering sheets of paper with their selfconscious and almost always imitative lucubrations on a world of which they have no reflective experience. And one finds it difficult to believe that the result, even under the most favorable circumstances, would be anything but worthless to the children and to the community. As far as the development of the poetic sense is concerned,

doubtless far more would be accomplished by making them acquainted in some human way-alas, all too rare in the schools-with the radiant pageantry of true poetry that every boy and girl ought to relive.

Perhaps if Miss Teasdale had ever been a publisher's reader she would know that already far too many peo ple are "flowing away, singing" than can be contemplated with serenity by anyone who has a wasteless nation at heart, and that any prospect of having the nation at large take up the pursuit of poetry might result in the complete extinction of the publishing business.

Apropos of the subject of children and poetry, Madeline Alston has a very pleasant article in the "Poetry Review" for August in which she recounts some of her personal experiences in cultivating the love of poetry in children. Her list of books will prove valuable to those who have been puzzled to find the answer to this problem. Among other things she says:

"It is from the child's mother, not in the schoolroom, that the poetic stimulus should first come. Poetry cannot bring the same joy read in the formal atmosphere of the schoolroom as when read by the fireside stretched on the hearthrug amidst the associations of the home; or, better still, read in the garden, in the woods or fields, or by the sea. To feel free to wander at will, to pick a cowslip or throw a stone in the water, to turn a somersault or utter a war-whoop, takes away the air of compulsion that hovers around all schoolwork and destroys the very spirit of poetry. In the home, too, individual preferences can receive consideration to an extent not possible in school. Children

show great diversity of tastes. The preferences of boys differ from those of girls, as Henley recognized when he made his 'Lyra Heroica' anthology. Girls prefer to hear about other children, about fairies and flowers or subjects connected with the home. They are not less imaginative than boys, but their thoughts do not roam so far afield.

Lions and dragons,

shipwreck and battle have not the same fascination for girls as for boys. My little girls loved and immediately committed to memory Masefield's beautiful little verse quoted in "The Spirit of Man':

'O lovely lily clean,
O lily springing green,
O lily bursting white,
Dear lily of delight:
Spring in my heart agen

That I may flower to men!'

"They were also charmed by Christina Rossetti's 'Golden Glories':

"The buttercup is like a golden cup, The marigold is like a golden frill, The daisy with a golden eye looks up, And golden spreads the flag beside the rill,

And gay and golden nods the daffodil, The gorsey common swells a golden sea,

The cowslip hangs a head of golden tips,

And golden drips the honey which the bee

Sucks from sweet hearts of flowers and stores and sips.'

"These two poems would leave a boy cold. In reading Tennyson a girl will ask for the 'May Queen', while a boy will demand "The Charge of the Light Brigade'; but they meet on common ground in their enjoyment of Browning's 'Piper of Hame

lin' or 'Hiawatha', and in their love of the old ballads.

"But in all modern poetry for children there is nothing quite so gem-like, so sweet or so charming as the poems that have been appearing in 'Punch' by Rose Fyleman. Could anything be more delicious than:

'Have you seen the fairies when the rain is done?'

or

"There are fairies at the bottom of the garden'

or

'A fairy went a-marketing'?"

THE BOOKMAN inaugurates with this issue two departments in the back of the magazine which it is hoped will grow to large proportions of usefulness for its readers. One is "Where to Buy Books", which will contain the announcements of booksellers all over the country whose facilities enable them to serve you quickly and well no matter where you are. The other, "THE BOOKMAN Limited", is a selected list of the month's books which the various publishers feel are of sufficient immediate importance to deserve your careful attention. Each publisher makes his own selection and he is limited to an announcement of two books only.

A week or two ago William Marion Reedy in his shining "Mirror" protested against the "Veblenization" of "The New Republic", "The Dial", "The Public" and other organs of opinion. It is interesting that almost of a sudden Thorstein Veblen's influence should become so widely potent. It is almost twenty years since the publication of "The Theory of the Lei

sure Class". Since then the author has written a number of books equally effective in their respective spheres. It is likely, however, that his volume entitled "The Higher Learning in America, a Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men", to be published early this season by B. W. Huebsch, will attract greater attention than any of his earlier books. Coming as it does after the various expulsions of professors, clashes between trustees and faculties and administrative tyrannies, it affords an opportunity to consider the whole question of the relation of the university to the people and of college government. Professor Veblen's treatment of his subject gives his book an interest that will probably extend its reading far beyond academic confines.

Grantland Rice, whose "Songs of the Stalwart", published by D. Appleton and Company, is in its third edition, has reached France with his regiment. He is Lieutenant Rice now, of the 115th Field Artillery of Tennessee. "Why Tennessee?" someone asked, and Lieutenant Rice said, "Well, it had to be Tennessee, because, you see, I was born there. Naturally, when I answered the call to the colors I went home to do it. I guess on such occasions a man feels that, given his preference, he will cast in his lot with the men who have been reared in his home country. So I'm here, and that is all there is to it, except that I'm glad I'm here." Since his arrival in France, Rice has been one of the leading contributors to "The Stars and Stripes".

Peter B. Kyne is now a Captain in the 144th Coast Artillery. This is Captain Kyne's second appearance in

the Army. He served in the Philippines in '98. In addition to being a soldier he has been a newspaper man, a lumber man, a railroad man and a miner. He knows much about Mexico. "The Valley of the Giants", published by Doubleday, Page and Company, his latest novel, is the story of the Red Woods of California.

In September Duffield and Company will publish a book with the very interesting title "The Applewoman of the Klickitat", by Anna V. R. Morris. The volume, it is said, gives actual experiences, told in story form, of a New York newspaper woman, who goes to the Washington apple-growing country and develops a quarter section of government land into an orchard at the time when the locality was being opened up to settlement and improvement. A new sort of frontier is presented, all sorts of men and women, Americans, a few English, some Indian types, and left-over pioneers of the mining days. The fictional interest is a young Princeton man who visits the girl and her brother during his vacation. He falls in love with the wife of a professional well-borer, but the situation is saved for both of them. The chief interest, one gathers, is in the many types of settlers and in the development of the applegrowing country.

Two Kipling books will be published this Fall by Doubleday, Page and Company. In "The Eyes of Asia" the author goes back to his old East Indian life transplanted to the field of France.

The second book is a book of verse, the tentative title of which is "Gethsemane". This includes the greater part of his war verse and those poems which have appeared since the last

When General Pershing got to France, he was glad to find Dorothy Canfield there. She had been a favorite pupil of his in mathematics at the Kansas War College when she was a girl of fifteen, and now was there ahead of him with her husband, Mr. Fisher, who had been training American ambulanciers while his wife had been rendering most valuable help to Miss Winifred Holt, daughter of her publisher, Mr. Henry Holt, in her work for "Men Blinded in Battle". General Pershing has now accepted the dedication of Dorothy Canfield's "Home Fires in France", which Professor W. L. Phelps of Yale calls "the finest work of fiction-if fiction it can be called-produced from an American by the war." He has also joined Miss

Holt's "Committee for Men Blinded in Battle", the pioneer American work of this kind abroad.

Edward Stilgebauer, author of "The Ship of Death", published by Brentano, is one of those few Germans who refuse to stifle their consciences. As a result of the sentiments and facts expressed in his novels, he has been obliged to flee from Germany, and is now hiding in one of the neutral countries.

Homer Croy, whose first novel, "Boone Stop", has just been published by the Harpers, will leave next week for France. Mr. Croy has offered his services to the Y. M. C. A. to operate motion-picture shows in the huts and camps near the front lines, providing American soldiers with entertainment in off-duty moments. "Boone Stop" is far removed from the movies, being the story of a boy, his father and mother, in the Ozark Mountains, with what is described as a Mark-Twainish sort of humor.

Before he joined Uncle Sam's forces a few months ago, Irving R. Allen, author of "The Money Maker", published by Dodd, Mead and Company, was an efficiency expert and adviser to leaders in the world of business, and his salary, it is said, ran well up into the five-figure class. The author introduces a few of his efficiency ideas into his love story-he even has an efficient and time-saving method of proposal.

The "Education of Henry Adams", for which an eager public has been anxiously waiting ever since its private publication some ten years ago, is to be published in September by