The people like the Fifth Maryland. Its officers like it. And if the “retired” officers are not allowed to go back to their command,—these officers whom their men love,—there will be no more Fifth Regiment. Its other officers will resign, its faithful enlisted men will vanish like smoke, and in the place of the Fifth of fame there will be a hybrid combination, sustained by that sort of political power that commands no respect from honest-thinking men. There is yet time for the “powers that be” to pause. The Fifth Regiment is not a thing to be ruthlessly slaughtered. Parties come and parties go, but there are elections yet to come, and the men of Maryland and of the South will not forget those who killed their cherished Fifth Maryland. [Illustration] [Illustration: BOOKS & AUTHORS] TWO POET-NOVELISTS. GEORGE MEREDITH. Art and artists are continually suffering at the hands of “belletristic triflers.” Phrase-making is the passion of the day; and as a falsity or a half-truth concerning literary matters is so much easier of utterance than the awkward whole truth, that demands lengthy qualifications, we seldom find the latter gaining in the race with glittering mendacities. It is not, for instance, the saner body of Matthew Arnold’s criticism that has been generally absorbed; it is his more or less questionable catch-words and airy brevities of characterization. These seem apt to the understanding because they fit so well the tongue; their convenience gives them their fatal persuasion. The world likes a criticism in little, a nut-shell verdict, something of intellectual color that can readily be memorized for dinner-table parlance, the vague generalization that conceals the specific ignorance. Macaulay’s “rough pistolling ways and stamping emphasis,” Scott’s “bastard epic style,” and the conception of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain” have thus come to be solemn verities with many who care more to talk literature than to read it. A whilom gaiety of journalism served to convince the public that Whitman’s voice was a “barbaric yawp”; and consequently his “Leaves of Grass” is seldom glimpsed save in a spirit of derision. These are some of the unhappy results of our latter-day strain after “a pregnant conciseness” of language.