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that, while the general purport of many of these reviews was mistaken, in detail they were often correct. It is worth remembering that in the most savage period of book reviewing, in the days of Jeffrey, the arch-executioner (often apparently confused with Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assizes!), and along with their ponderous paragraphs, these hardhearted critics often wrote much good

sense.

2

To learn that we need not spend too much time in lamenting the lost art of book reviewing read Stuart Sherman's "Critical Woodcuts." " Mr. Sherman left his professorship and came East to be the hammer of the heathen. He is the one man who can meet Mr. H. L. Mencken on his own ground and, without resorting to billingsgate, leave "the bad boy of Baltimore" like an upset beetle. It is true that Mr. Sherman occasionally horrifies all of us staid conOnce or twice a year he servatives. suddenly grabs up a red flag and gallops down the street, cheering frantically for some one like Ben Hecht. But for the most part, and for nineteen Sundays out of twenty, he is the critic I love best to read. The humor of his comments upon Mr. Poultney Bigelow's memoirs has hardly been matched since the "Nation's" famous article about "Ben Hur." And in this book he turns upon the recent biographers of Stevenson in a fashion that makes me want to give twelve long cheers. Listen to it:

"What lions have these critical fellows shot with a bow and arrow, that they turn up superior noses at Stevenson, who merely consorted with thieves and harlots in the slums of Edinburgh and London, ran through the professions of engineering and law before he was twenty-five, explored the Scotch coast in a sailboat, canoed the Sambre and Oise, slept in a lonely bivouac à la belle étoile in the Cévennes, fled to San Francisco by emigrant train, ran away with a wife and family, camped on Mount St. Helena, chartered his own schooner, sailed the South Seas for three years, feasted with cannibal chiefs, refused to sleep with their wives, conspired with Kanaka kings, was threatened with deportation, planted a wilderness, governed a small tribe of savages and died in his boots?

"If these lofty critical fellows hold that Stevenson's sheltered and coddled life starved and devitalized his romance, come, let us bring them to confession and require them to tell us what sort of dare-devil existence a really 'modern' writer must live."

Many and many years may Professor

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aster and

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26

Sherman flourish and write, while he can so ably de-bunk the little group of psychological, psycho-analytical critics and biographers who have made such a racket of late!

By a sad coincidence, Stuart Sherman's death occurred the day after this review was written. I will let my comment stand, except to record my sorrow at the loss of this distinguished critic.

Travel

CONCERNING CORSICA.

trations by Jan Juta. York. $2.75.

E. P.

IllusBy Réné Juta. Alfred A. Knopf, New

By her own confession, Réné Juta gets more than one hundred per cent interest out of places and people. Her enthusiasm, as much as anything Corsican, impresses the reader. Corsica and its adjacent islands are rich in legends of song and story. Near one of these islands, during a storm many years ago, Cardinal Newman wrote his Garibaldi, hymn "Lead, Kindly Light."

who before his death in 1882 prophesied
that "Italy must have one man-a strong
man-at the head," is buried on the island
At Calvi is the traditional
of Caprera.
birthplace of Columbus. Here, too, Nelson
lost an eye in action.

Descriptions of graves of dead heroes, of towns perched on golden cliffs, of fishermen in little harbors where the famous langouste is caught, and where the fish are "batiked like the sea, are frilled and finned, fanned and almost feathered in rainbow For the colors," make vivid pictures.

archæologist there is an interesting chapter on the "Nuraghi," curious conical towers built of large stone blocks without cement, relics of an early Sardinian civilization which some authorities place before 3000 B.C.

"Concerning Corsica" is a book of many gorgeous metaphors and glowing similes; the illustrations by Jan Juta are as decoThere are some practirative as the text. cal suggestions for traveling about the island, and a useful appendix with directions on how to get there, the price of hotels, and which of these have nightingales and syringa in the garden, and a timely reminder to carry your own flea powder when you go to this paradise tempered by fleas.

THE SAGA OF A SUPERCARGO.

By Fullerton

Waldo. Illustrated with Photographs by the Author. The Macrae Smith Company, Philadelphia. $3.

The indefinable but unmistakable mark of a good journalist is evident on every page of this record of a voyage to Greenland for a cargo of kryolith. Although exSecretary Redfield does not say as much in his "Dependent America," this stone is evidently one of the many essential materials States must import. which the United Kryolith is used as a solvent with bauxite in the production of aluminum, and is an in the increasingly important element It is no porcelain and enamel industries. It resimple matter to mine the stone. quires the constant attention of the pick of Mr. Denmark's junior technical experts. Waldo makes interesting reading of this, and of every dog, cat, and Eskimo baby that crossed his path. Simple and distinguished writing raises the book to the high level of its title, however, in his account of the actual voyage, and particularly in his transcriptions of the tales of the captain of the Bauta.

Religion

THE BOOK NOBODY KNOWS. By Bruce Barton. Company, Indianapolis. Bobbs-Merrill The $2.50. Here Mr. Barton follows, in his familiar but never irreverent way of talking, the

From "Concerning Corsica," Alfred A. Knopf, publisher

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Selling Cheese

- Bastia

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The black-robed women sell their little white goats'-milk cheeses, called "brocchio," in the dark vaulted streets of Bastia

method pursued in his so widely read "The
Man Nobody Knows." What is the Bible?
How did we get it? How far is it inspired?
How did all these
What is its history?
writings-literature, poetry, history, legis-
lation, prophecy, ecstasy-come together in
one work? Why is it now and always the
"best seller"? Questions like these Mr.
Barton presents and discusses freely but
not controversially. Its information is con-
veyed in a manner that is the reverse of
"preachy," that is always picturesque and
incentive of interest.

ESSAYS ON RELIGION.

By A. Clutton-Brock.

E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $2. In seven essays the author attempts a psychological study of the problem of evil, an inquiry into the nature of God, and an elucidation of one of the root causes of war This -false patriotism, the jingo spirit. he unmasks as pooled self-esteem, the ferment of suppressed egos which have not When men become found normal outlets. aware that to boast of their country is as vulgar as boasting of their wives, he believes, national egotism will subside and warfare become obsolete.

Fiction

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It becomes Stanislaus on the secret. Demba and the reader versus order and The young student the Viennese police. has committed a crime well known to librarians, and escaped from the police. Hiding handcuffs under a long black cape, he stalks through a day of adventure while trying to obtain the 200 kronen necessary to elope with Sonia. Amusing misfortunes of necessity follow each attempt. Striking characterizations of Demba, Sonia, and their intimates and ingenious situations The climax is a mark this original tale. humorous scene in a Viennese café, but it is that peculiar brand of humor, with an underlying grimness, that comes out of the north.

By Jackson
THE DESERT THOROUGHBRED.
Gregory. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
$2.

There is excitement enough here to satisfy the most avid lover of danger and adventure. The innocent and lovely heroine is bandied about between two villains, from one side of the Mexican border to the other, and the rancher-hero, supposed to be a murderer but actually an innocent and noble gentleman, an author, and a breeder of Arabian steeds, foils her enemies and his own, to the great satisfaction of all readers. The incidents and plot are ingeniously planned.

Literature

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2 vols. Translated Vol. I-The Middle Ages and the Renascence (650-1660). By Emile Legouis. from the French by Helen Douglas Irvine. The Macmillan Company, New York. $3.75. We had read many histories, complete or partial, of English literature, and to the

total effect of that reading we attribute much of the sadness of our life. We entertained no hope of a history of English literature that should evince profound erudition, without somniferous parade thereof; that should be thorough, yet obedient to the Confucian maxim to avoid preoccupation with trifles; independent, without assertiveness; delicate in its judgments, without preciousness; humorous, without invocation of Momus; well-proportioned; free of tiresome hobbies about the Zeitgeist, the milieu, evolution-that sort of thing; in fine, a history of English literature that should run its predecessors off the shelves. But here is such a history; at least in part. Let us pray that M. Louis Cazamian, who is to complete the survey in a second volume, will be as well inspired as M. Legouis. Though, thank Heaven, not Olympian, M. Legouis is sufficiently catholic, his catholicity being charmingly and to good effect qualified by a soupçon (maybe more) of the French esprit. We say, "to good effect," since it stresses the criterion of form, is offended by the unlicked, the inchoate. The work of translation is commendable.

Notes on New Books

By Lalla

MONARCHS AND MILLIONAIRES.
Vandervelde. The Adelphi Company, New
York. $5.

The wife of a Belgian Minister of State comments on her experiences in Europe and America.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE SCAPA SOCIETY. By Richardson Evans. Constable & Co., Ltd., London. 6s.

The Scapa Society is an English organization for checking the abuses of public advertising.

DISEASE PREVENTION. By Dr. H. H. Waite. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. $4.50.

By the Professor of Bacteriology and Pathology in the University of Nebraska. THE SHAKESPEARE COUNTRY. By C. Showell. A. & C. Black, Ltd., London.

A readable guide-book, well illustrated.

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BLOOD PRESSURE, HIGH AND LOW. By Chester Tilton Stone. Allen Ross & Co., New York. $1.50.

EDUCATION IN SOVIET RUSSIA. By Scott Nearing. The International Publishers, New York. $1.50.

PILLARS OF GOLD. By Mitchell Bronk. The Judson Press, Philadelphia. $1.50. "Sketches of Christian people, places, and experiences."

THE YOUNG FOLKS' BOOK OF INVENTION. By T. C. Bridges. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $2.

A well-illustrated book for boys and girls, ten to fifteen.

THE YOUNG FOLKS' BOOK OF MYTHS.
Amy Cruse.

$2.

By

Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

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STAMMERING

If the stammerer can talk with ease when alone, and most of them can, but stammers in the presence of others, it must be that in the presence of others he does something that interferes with Nature in the speech process. If then we know what it is that interferes, and the stammerer be taught how to avoid that, it must be that he is getting rid of the thing that makes him stammer. That's the philosophy of our method of cure. Let us tell you about it. SCHOOL FOR STAMMERERS, Tyler, Texas.

W

HERE is the ultimate West, and when will all things reach it? And, after they reach it, will the earth be stagnant and dead because there will be nothing left to struggle for?

Two bits of editorial comment have started me puzzling over an old mystery; taking out of my memory scraps that I have accumulated through a quarter-century, turning them over, and, somewhat idly, trying to fit them together. I cannot, of course. I am not a scientist, and this is perhaps more deeply scientific than the deepest delvings of our scientific men.

One of those bits of comment was printed in The Outlook. It was based on the belief of scientists, now to be checked by radio, that the continents of the earth are slowly drifting westward westward and equatorward, the paragraph said. The other bit was in some newspaper and had to do with the asserted fact that radio waves themselves are easily transmissible westward, but are transmissible eastward only with extreme difficulty, and then with no more than partial success.

Here are two westward drifts that I had not known of. Perhaps there are still many-some, almost certainly that nobody yet suspects. But I started remembering the ones that I had found for myself. Doubtless many other persons knew of them, but that does not change the fact that, so far as I individually am concerned, I found them.

IT

was quite a quarter of a century ago that, sitting in the small hours of the morning at the city editor's desk of a little daily newspaper and reading a letter from home which recounted the small doings of the neighborhood, including the removal of a neighbor from one farm to another, it occurred to me to check over the shifting of families from farm to farm within that neighborhood and within my recollection.

When I completed the task, I had a list of thirty-seven such moves. Thirty of them were moves westward. Seven were moves eastward, but of these seven three were of men who had first moved westward and then had gone back to their original homes. Only four out of thirty-seven were permanent moves to the east. Of the thirty families that had moved westward, some had moved nearly north or nearly south, but all west of a north-and-south line.

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If there is any local reason why this should be true, I have never been able to

the great majority, being free for the first time in their lives, drift westward.

That is a thing apart from the general drift of population toward the newer lands of the west, all the way across the continent. What I am speaking of is not mass movement through long distances, but individual movement through distances quite short.

find it. It is an old, slow-changing, AT about the time that I made that

colonial-stock neighborhood.

A

FEW weeks ago I sat, late one afternoon, in my automobile in a corner of the public square of the court

house town of my county. An old friend, a lawyer there, came and sat with me, and we talked. Time came for closing the stores around the square, and as the salesmen and proprietors came out I realized that I was a stranger in my own town. Only here and there did I see a face that had been familiar to me in the old days. When my friend and I went over the list of the merchants who used to be there, we found that only two were left of those who kept store when I went out into the world from that town.

In that fact there is nothing remarkable. The list of merchants in any town is practically made new in twenty-five years. But the way in which their places have been filled, if my friend's information is correct, is remarkable. "As the old ones died or retired or failed," he said, "their places were filled by men from the eastern counties. Seventy-five per cent of the men who own businesses in this town to-day came to us from the east."

My friend says that these men closed out their businesses east-from twenty to a hundred miles and came west because of better schools and better roads. I said: "It appears to me that some of the counties to the west of us have no better roads and no better schools than the counties to the east. Haven't we acquired any business men from those counties to the west?"

"Well," he admitted, "there are poor roads and poor schools to the west, too; but those people-well, they go somewhere else."

West, perhaps? I don't know, and I did not suggest this westward-drift idea to my friend. What I do know is that of both farmers and business men who in that community detach themselves from the soil to which they were born,

first check of my neighbors' movements twenty-five years ago I had an interest in twenty-odd acres of land which constituted a part of the most promising suburban section of the little city in which I sojourned. The land was

immediately south of the city, on the

best road leading out from it, with topography much the most attractive to be found around the city, with good houses built squarely up to the property all along the line. Development, everybody knew, was going that way immediately. But it did not. It jumped a mile of slums and sloughs and went west.

I did not know then, being young and not worldly wise, that cities ordinarily do grow westward unless some insurmountable obstacle lies that way-and the obstacle must be really insurmountable, not just apparently so. Washington is, per

haps, the most notable example. There

was never a doubt in the minds of George Washington and l'Enfant when they planned the capital city that it would grow from the Capitol grounds eastward. That way the land was high, attractive. To the west was a region of comparatively level, and in every way tide-water creeks and marsh-grass hummocks. Did Washington grow to the east? It did not. It went helter-skelter down the hill into those bogs and creeks and stands ten feet above sea-level instead of two hundred feet, as it might have stood. Until the tidal basin was constructed, at great expense and as the result of consummate engineering skill, the brackish water of the Potomac used, when it pleased, to wash through the buildings on the Mall and along Pennsylvania Avenue. The back door of the Capitol is toward the portion of the city where all the principal buildings are, its front door toward a half-deserted region of cheap houses.

USED to go tramping every day, after I had finished my editorial work on an evening paper, looking for birds, studying them through a field-glass, climbing to their nests. At the end of

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three years I realized that, while I knew every woods and bush clump and weedy ravine for ten miles west of the city, the region east of the city was practically unexplored country for me. For a thousand days and more I had been tramping out to the west, or more nearly to the west than to any other point of the compass, east only when there was some special reason for doing it.

About that time I came by chance upon Thoreau's essay on walking. It was written during his tax-dodging period of playing the hermit at Walden's Pond. Thoreau says in that essay that whenever he came out of his cabin for a walk without having previously fixed upon a destination he invariably and inevitably walked west or southwest"westward and equatorward," as our editorial writer said of the continents.

Does every man walk westward when he walks naturally? Perhaps the rest of you know whether you do or not. At least two of us have known that we did.

A

FEW years ago I became quite enthusiastic over a vigorous kind of grass that grows with wonderful luxuriance in a little bottom in one of our pastures. I thought the world ought to have the benefit of that grass, and I had no doubt that it was native. It has been there ever since I can remember, and, according to tradition, much longer. But Professor Piper, the grass expert of the United States Department of Agriculture, told me that it was a European grass. He went a good deal further and told me that practically all of our grasses were European grasses. He went even further than that. "Our native grasses," he said, "simply cannot hold their own in competition with European grasses. Those brought from Europe exterminate ours, while ours, taken to Europe, struggle for a little while and die." He gave me to understand, in general, that if a species of grass changes or extends its habitat at all, it goes always west, never east.

WHAT else is there? Races, civili

zations, empires, religions--all of them, from the dawn of time until this day, have moved westward out of the east, and then on again to a remoter west out of an acquired orient. Men moving from place to place in the same community; men seeking business opportunity near home; cities restless from growing pains-they are drawn to the west. Grass roots and continentswestward!

Possibly all of this can be explained. Drawn by the tidal force of the moon; trying to attain the sunset-no end of explanations. David Grayson, you may

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