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principle of freedom in teaching is in any serious danger at Stanford University. It certainly could not suffer at the hands of President Jordan, who was sufficiently well known both for character and scholarship before he went out to make Stanford University one of the greatest civilizing influences, and himself one of the greatest individual forces for good, on the Pacific Coast.

COMMUNICATIONS.

POE AND THE HALL OF FAME.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

The list of the first twenty-nine immortals chosen for the "Hall of Fame for Great Americans," inaugurated by the New York University, does not include the name of Edgar Allan Poe. This time, who hath done it ?

A body of one hundred electors, composed of twentyfive university or college presidents, twenty-six professors of history and scientists, twenty-six editors and authors and publicists, and twenty-three supreme court judges, State and National "representing the wisdom of the American people," - these are the jurymen who have failed to find a place for Poe in an American Hall of Fame.

Literary England, and particularly Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, would doubtless question that "wisdom" which shows itself in undervaluing Art. Mr. Gosse regards Poe as our most perfect, most original, and most exquisite poet, and says that were he an American he would consider the nation's failure to appreciate him extraordinary, sinister, and disastrous.

THE DIAL'S Symposium on "The American Rejection of Poe," a year or two ago, brought out many warm defenders of the poet, one of whom wrote: "Poe, in my judgment, was the greatest intellect America has produced-assuredly the best artist. His tales seem to me the third collection in point of merit in literature the other two being the Arabian Nights and Boccaccio." And another: "Of all the American poets of the day, Poe alone fades not. The rest have lost color. They worked in daguerreotype; he painted in oil." And still another: "One great good thing in a poet like Poe is that he shows what art for art's sake can do. We in America need no incitement to value literature for its practical worth. We do not need to be told that thought is important, for we know it. But we do need to be told that art, or style, is of value, for as a rule we are not so much on the lookout for that."

Why are these defenders of the poet silent now in the face of this fresh injustice to his memory?

In imagination, creative faculty, analysis, and originality, Poe has but one rival in American literature. In musical poetry in the marvellous use he made of the power which the great god Pan blew into him "none sing so wildly well." To undervalue him because he left behind him no Emersonian rules of life and conduct

because the glory of his matchless rhyme does not lie in “teaching men how to live well"—is as absurd as it would be to undervalue Chopin because he did not write the Sonatas of Beethoven.

As the "Hall of Fame " is a private enterprise, its

final significance may perhaps be questioned; but as it is the only thing of its kind we have or may for some time have in America, its meaning to the American people will grow in importance with the years, and it is as well to treat it seriously.

Resolution Six of the rules adopted by the University Senate relating to the nomination of candidates states that "Any nomination by any citizen of the United States that shall be addressed to the New York University Senate' shall be received and considered by that body."

Why should not all lovers of Poe avail themselves of the opportunity therein afforded to place his name in nomination? KATE W. Beaver.

San Francisco, December 15, 1900.

A DISCREDITED MUSEUM OF ETRUSCAN
ARCHEOLOGY.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

A recent pamphlet by a young Italian excavator, Sig. Fausto Benedetti, treats of matters which, though of immediate importance to only a small group of specialists in Etruscan archæology, are indirectly of interest to a much wider public. For they affect the scientific standing and the official honor of Comm. Barnabei, who was lately Director of Antiquities and Fine Arts for the kingdom of Italy, and is reported to be seeking reinstatement in the same position; and no cultivated visitor to Italy, no friend anywhere of Italian art and antiquities, can afford to be indifferent to the manner in which that office is administered.

In 1888 a museum was established in the Villa Ginlia, situated a half mile or so outside the Porta del Popolo, and this museum has been stocked chiefly with objects found in the territory of the ancient Falerii, the necropolis of Narce having furnished a large share of the material. This material is professedly arranged according to tombs, the contents of each tomb by themselves; and this separation is all-important for scientific purposes, inasmuch as the tombs belong to different epochs of Etruscan civilization. The objects from Narce have been elaborately described and discussed in Volume IV. of the "Monumenti Antichi,” the sumptuous archæological periodical issued by the Accademia dei Lincei. So far as appearances went, the arrangement in the museum and the publication in the "Monumenti Antichi" were controlled by a scientific rigor worthy of all praise. But disquieting charges in regard to this point have for some time been current; and now, on the heels of a whitewashing report made by a governmental commission, there comes a convincing attack from the hand of Sig. Benedetti, who conducted the excavations at Narce as a private enterprise of his father's and his own. The title of his pamphlet is "Gli Scavi di Narce ed il Museo di Villa Ginlia" [The Excavations at Narce and the Villa Ginlia Museum]; and it is published in Turin by Loescher, and in London by Mr. David Nutt.

The author was only fifteen years old when, in 1889, he began his work at Narce. He has presumably had but little education, and the wonder is that he writes as well as he does. He tells his story calmly, with every appearance of frankness and with full recognition of his own limitations. Moreover, he quotes extensively from documentary evidence which it is impossible to regard as falsified. So far as the present reviewer

can make out from the evidence before him, Sig. Benedetti completely establishes his case.

It appears that the museum in the Villa Ginlia has been managed with the grossest laxity and falsity. No pains were taken to secure adequate records of the excavations, and such information as the young excavator was able to supply was disregarded and his memoranda were actually destroyed. The plans of the various cemeteries and of the individual tombs pub

The New Books.

LETTER-WRITER AND POET.*

Now and then there crops up in print a new collection of letters, like Fitzgerald's or Smetham's or Stevenson's, good enough to set reviewers of the sanguine sort to hailing cheerfully a revival of the long-mourned-as-lost art of letter

lished in the "Monumenti Antichi" are inaccurate or wholly imaginary, and the contents of the various tombs have been hopelessly confused. With good writing. Such is the case with the two trim

reason may Sig. Benedetti write (page 44): "My labor has been lost, and the loss can never be recovered."

It is a deplorable story, but it is better that the truth should be known. If the injury done is beyond repair, at least it is to be hoped that the present Minister of Public Instruction in Italy and his successors may see to it that no such scandal in the Department of Antiquities and Fine Arts shall again be possible. F. B. TARBELL.

University of Chicago, December 20, 1900.

READING SHAKESPEARE AS A DUTY.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

Apropos of Mr. Anderson's remarks, in the last issue of THE DIAL, on my expression, “ We read Shakespeare as a duty," in the previous number, I may be permitted to explain that "we" does not implicate my critic nor others. However, I suspect that most educated people, if they were frank to confess, would acknowledge that while they enjoy Shakespeare's dramas as acted - the true test of the drama they do not find them special favorites as read. Though Shakespeare is said by many critics to be equally adapted to the stage and the closet, yet, as a matter of fact, he is rarely read save perfunctorily by college instructors and classes and by some precieuses. In short we are growing beyond the Shakespeare idolatry period, just as we are growing beyond the period of the idolatry of the Græco-Roman classics. Like Milton and the Bible, Shakespeare lies unopened in most cultivated homes from one year's end to another, at least as far as spontaneous pleasurable reading goes. If an honest census were made of those who, daily, weekly, or even monthly, turn to the reading of Shakespeare" with delight," their number would be found to be amazingly small. For those few, however, I have admiration and even envy; but I am unwilling to admit them as the sole representatives of the children of light, and the saving remnant from Philistinism in this generation. HIRAM M. STANLEY. Lake Forest, Ill., December 25, 1900.

EARLY this year will be published Prof. A. Campbell Fraser's new edition, in four volumes, of the Complete Works of Bishop Berkeley, all arranged in chronological order. Professor Fraser has thoroughly revised and recast his previous edition of the Works, published in three octavo volumes at the Clarendon Press in 1871, and now out of print. The Introductions and Notes have been practically re-written; and a brief new biography will be prefixed. All fresh materials that have come to light within the last thirty years have been incorporated throughout; and this may be regarded as the final Oxford edition of the great Irish Philosopher.

volumes now before us, the Letters of Thomas Edward Brown; and it should be said, and of interest caused by them is the result of the noted as a favorable sign, that the marked stir intrinsic and generally unlooked-for merit of the letters themselves, and not of the celebrity of the writer,- Brown's public, even in his own country, not having been a large one.

An author of no wide vogue at home, Brown has been, we think, even less known in America; and hence a word or so about him now, a statement of the main facts in his not very eventful career, prefatory to the foretaste we propose giving through quotation of his certainly remarkable letters, may not come amiss. He was born in the Isle of Man in 1830, and died in 1897. His father, the Rev. Robert Brown, Vicar of Kirk Braddan, near Douglas, was a writer and preacher of something more than local repute a sort of Grandison of the pen (as we gather from the notice of him by the editor of the Letters), who was so nice in his notions of literary deportment that he used to "make his son read to him some fragment of an English classic before answering an invitation." At fifteen Brown went to King William's College, where he distinguished himself in verse composition, Greek, Latin, and English, and developed that distaste for mathematics so often coupled with the literary gift. An old schoolfellow, Archdeacon Wilson, thus speaks of him :

"I can well remember, as a small boy of eleven, just placed in the fifth class at King William's College, having Brown pointed out to me, not without awe. He was said to know more than any master!' and 'to have written the best Latin prose that the University examiners had ever seen!' . . . Of course he never saw or spoke to a youngster like me."

The "of course" can only be appreciated by those who know from some experience what

* LETTERS OF THOMAS EDWARD BROWN, Author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns." Edited, with Introductory Memoir, by Sidney T. Irwin. In two volumes. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF T. E. BROWN. With portrait. New York: The Macmillan Co.

the "head boy" of an English school is to his cringing and reverential juniors, who are only too glad to blacken his boots, and fetch and carry for him like so many spaniels. The drop from this high estate of "head boy" to the quasi-menial one of a servitorship at Christ Church, Oxford, whither he went in 1849, was a trying one for Brown, as is bitterly indicated in an article on the position of a servitor at Oxford in his time, which he wrote years after for "Macmillan's Magazine." But to Oxford he went, and his academical career there is described as a peculiarly brilliant one. He not only won a double First Class in 1853, but found himself, in 1854, " in the proud position of a Fellow of Oriel "- as Dr. Fowler records with academic unction.

The life of an Oxford Fellow was not, however, one to Brown's liking. He had no wish, he said, to "fatten on a Fellowship," nor did a Tutorship attract him; so after a few terms with private pupils he returned to the Isle of Man, and became Vice-Principal of King William's College. Then he went to the Crypt School, at Gloucester, where his friend Mr. W. E. Henley was his pupil. After a brief stay at Gloucester he was asked to take the Modern Side at Clifton College, Bristol; and there he remained as a master for thirty-six years, leading a life outwardly uneventful but intellectually rich, and productive of work of which the world has taken too little notice. All his published poems were written, and most of them were published, while he was at Clifton Betsy Lee," in 1873; "Fo'c's'le Yarns (including "Betsy Lee "), in 1881, and in 1889; "The Doctor and Other Poems," in 1887; "The Manx Witch and Other Poems," in 1889; and "Old John and Other Poems," in 1893. These works have now been gathered into a rather thick volume of Collected Poems, which comes to us almost simultaneously with the Letters.

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A former pupil at Clifton, Mr. H. F. Brown (the author, if we remember rightly, of an admirable book on Venice), writes as follows of the impression he retained of his old master's strong and somewhat rugged personality:

"He never spoke to me out of school, and I never knew him at all privately or socially at that time, but his personality made a great impression; his slow sort of urgent walk, like Leviathan, his thick massive figure, above all his voice. I used to see him in the distance on his lonely strolls about the downs, and his figure seemed to belong to and to explain the downs, the river, the woods, the Severn, and the far Welsh hills. I remember him walking in the rain, and looking as if he liked

it, as I did. Personally, at that time I was afraid of him; but he stirred fancy, curiosity, imagination. I He was a widener.' He made one feel that should say that his educational function lay in 'widen

ing.

there was something beyond the school, beyond successful performances at lessons or at games; there was a whiff of the great world brought in by him.”

Brown's letters, as selected for publication by Mr. Sidney T. Irwin, the editor of these volumes and long a colleague of Brown's at Clifton, extend chronologically from 1851, or the period of the author's undergraduateship, to 1897, the year of his death. Whatever faults may have been ascribed to Brown in his lifetime, no one ever thought of calling him commonplace. His mind was one of quite unusual turn and content; and he gave it free rein in his letters. He liked, as he said, "to please his friends"; and when he took pen in hand to write to a friend he poured out without stint the best he could say or fancy of the topic in hand. He did not "keep his best for the printer," for he was singularly indifferent to general recognition, and had no need of slaving for that difficult and fickle taskmaster and patron, the public. The not too wide circlə of his chosen friends was the public he served by choice, and the one whose approval he valued most. His love of nature was profound, and sought frequent expression in word-paintings, a little rhapsodic at times, but often of marked power and beauty, as in the following picture of the Jungfrau :

"So the Jungfrau vis-a-vis-es you frankly through the bright sweet intervening air. . . . One evening our sunset was the real rose-pink you have heard of so much. It fades, you know, into a death-like chalkwhite. That is the most awful thing. A sort of spasm seems to come over her face, and in an instant she is a corpse, rigid, and oh so cold! Well, so she died, and you felt as if a great soul had ebbed away into the Heaven of Heavens: and thankful, but very sad, I went up to my room. I was reading by candle-light, for it gets dark immediately after sunset, when A. shrieked to me to come to the window. What a Resurrection — so gentle, so tender like that sonnet of Milton's about his dead wife returning in a vision! The moon had risen; and there was the Jungfrau-ob, chaste, oh, blessed saint in glory everlasting! Then all the elemental spirits that haunt crevasses, and hover around peaks, all the patient powers that bear up the rocky buttresses, and labor to sustain great slopes, all streams, and drifts, and flowers, and vapors, made a symphony, a time most solemn and rapturous.

A young Swiss felt it, and with exquisite delicacy feeling his way, as it were, to some expression, however inadequate, he played a sonata of Schumann, and one or two of the songs, such as the Frühlingsnacht."

That Brown had in a high degree the artist's love of expression for its own sake is more evident in the following characteristic notelet:

"Last night I had a ramble which it would be hard to describe. I went round and round something; probably myself. One point there was upon the circumference a spark-a ship working her way up channel against wind and tide. The ship was invisible in the gloom, but the light-what intense yearning! and what pluck and energy too! It was like a red diamond, if there be such a thing, boring into blackness. I could almost hear the rip-rip of the severing sheets of darkness; or perhaps, rather, a delicate hum of the gritty grating stuff through which she had to pass. But no, I return to the first idea. The borer, the red diamond piercing the black marble."

To many readers not of the now ruling generation the following note (1881) on Carlyle's death will be gratefully intelligible: "And True Thomas' is gone.

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What has he not been to men of my generation? And the younger men come and ask one What was it? What did he teach? and so forth; and, of course, there is nothing to be said in that direction. And, if one mumbles something between one's teeth (impatiently, rather like a halfchewed curse)—something about a Baptism of fire my graceful adolescents look shocked, and, for the most part, repeat the question, 'Yes, yes, but what did he teach?' To which (I mean when repeated) there is no possible reply, but the honest outspoken D.

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The note on Carlyle naturally leads up to the following amusing dissertation on genius, evidently in reply to a friend's plaint of a particular instance of the proverbial seamy side of the man of genius.

"A genius! that's it. And they are all like that, almost all. Those little falsetti, and affectations, and posings, and putting the best foot foremost; those cravings for appreciation, the egotism, the self-consciousness (go ahead!), all characterize the genius. You must take him with them—take him or leave him alone. But you seem to seek a portent!-a man of genius and a man of hard practical common-sense knocked into one. The world has produced half a dozen such men. They are tremendous. ButHeaven help us!—you must be content with something less than this, or Nature will never get her men off her hands. Sell me a genius,' say you. Here you are,' says Nature, handing over a lot, plenty of choice: marked in figures; read-Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge-' 'Oh, I want — • Well, what do you want?' 'A strong, powerful, healthy intellect, and

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genius as a dooragh.'* Oh, thank you for nothing! We don't make them. You had better try the shop over the way, or give a special order, and we can try, provided you are willing to wait a thousand years or so!'. . . This rift within the lute' of genius is the inseparable accident . . . I have no doubt that to many of us it were better if we never got to know men of genius privately. You may depend upon it that, throughout the history of literature, they offended their contemporaries by their airs and their bosh, their petti

ness and their asinine conceit. Never mind! The world has taken its hat off to these men, and so must we. We need not stroke the quills on the back of the fretful porpentine '; let us avoid coming into too close contact. Perhaps some of them had better be kept in *I. e., "genius to boot."

cages. But chance may domesticate you with one; you may, for instance, marry one. Poor Mrs. Carlyle!" On the following somewhat satirical passage from a letter of 1895, comment were superfluous.

"Have you seen Mat. Arnold's Letters? I hear of a Penny Mat. Arnold published by Stead (!!). Is that possible? And to be followed by a Penny Clough! Did you ever? Is he publishing them in penny numbers? the whole to cost a lot? Or, positively, can we have Mat. - the whole unmutilated Mat. - for a penny ? And by Stead? Wonders will never cease, Fancy Mat., from that fair heaven which now holds his dainty ghost, stooping to sniff, etc. . . . Still, one has the consolation of thinking that he must be amused when he beholds waving a censor in his temple such a high-priest as Stead-amused - yes, and note the shrinking nostril, how it curves!"

The foregoing quotations should suffice to show the general tone and the genre of Brown's letters, and to establish the point, at least, that commonness is the last quality to be predicated of them. Their diversity, their rich allusiveness, their swift spontaneity, their protean mutability of mood, their odd humor, we have but faintly indicated. All in all, they seem to us to form one of the richest and most original collections of the kind of recent years. Mr. Irwin has done his editing well and helpfully, in the main; but for some inscrutable reason the volumes were issued without an Index, which they especially need. This omission we trust to see supplied in the forthcoming second edition of the Letters, already called for. The volumes are well printed, though not without an occasional slip in the spelling, — for instance, "Olnet" for Ohnet, on page 220, and "Cuddie" for Caddy, on page 208.

--

The popularity of Brown's letters will doubtless send people to reading, or re-reading, his poems; and hence the convenient volume of "Collected Poems of T. E. Brown" recently issued by the Messrs. Macmillan comes with especial timeliness. The not very poetic Manx dialect with which not a few of these earnest but somewhat rugged productions are plentifully sprinkled may prove an obstacle to some readers; and we should think that a taste for Brown's poetry must in general be something of an acquired one. But once acquired it will be likely to abide, and to prove a source of no small joy and profit of the high sort that genuine poetry alone, with a strain of broad human sympathy in it, can give. The volume contains 736 compact pages, and is the latest number of its publishers' admirable series of Uniform Editions of the Poets, including such masters as Tennyson and Browning. A fine portrait of the author forms the frontispiece. E. G. J.

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CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA BEFORE
COLUMBUS.*

In these days of easy authorship and half-
matured production, it is a strengthening of
faith in the survival of learning to take up two
large volumes that show research and investi-
gation requiring many years of patient labor.
To attempt even a cursory examination of the
multitude of myths and legends on the rela-
tions between the Old and the New worlds
prior to Columbus is a task that might dissuade
any save a scholar who works under the in-
centive of religious zeal and writes from a fixed
purpose. Fifteen pages of closely-printed
bibliography reveal a searching investigation
that extends backward from the "moneron
of Darwin to the voyages of Columbus. In
addition to the printed authorities, two pages
of manuscripts and archives, mostly in the
Vatican, are included. The Bible, Humboldt's
Examen Critique, and Herrera's Historia
General are most frequently cited. Such an
exhaustive list of authorities on the relations
between the two hemispheres prior to Columbus
is rarely met with.

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in America, either at Behring Strait, or, after sailing through Polynesia, on the western coast of Central America and Peru." According to this hypothesis, Christianity becomes America's "second civilizer."

Finding here his real thesis, the author announces the apostle St. Thomas as the agent who brought Christianity to early America, although that St. James or St. Paul came is not" an unreasonable induction." Anticipating the objection that human agencies were wanting in those days for such journeys, the writer takes refuge in the superhuman or the miraculous. "Is not the whole establishment of Christianity one single great miracle too little noticed?" Discussion of this point resolves itself into the old controversy between the Spanish church which claimed the credit for the evangelization of America, and the other Roman Catholic nations which objected to such a monopoly.

An examination of the rites of the western savages further strengthens the hypothesis of a pre-Columbian Christianity. Crude forms. of the confessional are found, as well as baptism, the eucharist, convents, monasteries, and celibates. Penance is not uncommon; but when penance becomes self-torture, it ceases to be a church function, according to the author, and becomes one of "Satan's rites." Numerous witnesses are found to testify to the finding of the crucifix among so-called heathen emblems; of the representation of a man fastened to a cross; of the expectation of a Messiah, and even his birth from a virgin.

Rejecting, on religious grounds, the theory of evolution, which he terms "the fashionable school of science sprung up during the latter half of our century," as also the suggestion that the American aborigines were pre-Adamites, the author proceeds to examine the Cave Dwellers and the Mound Builders as types of people separate from the Indians of Columbus, and possessing a higher civilization, whose origin must be accounted for. Such advanced state is also indicated by ruins in Central America, California, Peru, and Brazil. Similarity between the traditions of the aborigines and the descriptions of the Old Testament forms further proof of a pre-Christian civilization. As a means of crossing the waters, the author seems to accept Plato's Atlantis, as nearly as he expresses a definite opinion on any point raised. Seeking the peoples by whom this civilization was brought from the Old world to the New, he rejects the Phoenicians, Jews, pre-Christian Irish, Romans, and Africans, and, by the law of elimination, is "in-host of daring men who crossed the "great clined to believe" that these traditions were "brought into America by the nearest descendants of the patriarch Noe, who had taken their course in an easterly direction, landing

HISTORY OF AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS. According to documents and approved authors. By P. De Roo. In two volumes. Philadelphia: The J. B. Lippincott Co.

The people of Ireland seem the most likely agents who disseminated this knowledge of the church in America. That no trace of them remains is due to their relapsing into barbarism. Traditions of the Welsh in America, the delightful crux of our scientific ancestors, are explained by a similar appearance and disappearance of that people. The claims of the Scandinavians are examined through the sagas, indubitable evidences of them being found all along the Atlantic coast from New York to New Foundland. Between these Norsemen and Columbus, the author finds a

Sea of Darkness," thus enabling him to proclaim with evident satisfaction his summing up, that "knowledge and not genius directed the voyages of Columbus."

Beginning by chance his inquiries among the archives of the Vatican, the author could not avoid a pardonable pride in the early

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