The scholars do not confine their thick-headed learning to old poets whose language is strange and who are made clearer by a note here and there. For some stranger reason scholars are hired to edit the modern poets in the popular series, those valuable and inexpensive reprints which help to spread poetry over the face of the earth and make it accessible to increasing numbers of readers. I pick up the "Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti," edited with introduction and notes by Charles Bell Burke, Ph.D., professor of English in the University of Tennessee. The volume is in Macmillan's Pocket Classics. I come upon "A Green Cornfield," a lovely lyric that must have made Shelley look down with interest "from the abode where the eternal are." There is reference to a note. I turn to it and find this: "An inverted simile? Consult Genung's 'Working Principles of Rhetoric,' p. 79, 2, example." I will not consult Genung. I will advise all the pupils in my school never to consult Genung while they are reading poetry. I commend to those hard-working young men and women in the universities who are now studying under editors of Shakespeare to fit themselves to be editors of Shakespeare these sentences from Mr. Max Eastman's "Enjoyment of Poetry": "A misfortune incident to all education is the fact that those who elect to be teachers are scholars. They esteem knowledge not for its use in attaining other values, but as a value in itself; and hence they put an undue emphasis upon what is formal and nice about it, leaving out what is less pleasing to the instinct for classification but more needful to the art of life. This misfortune is especially heavy in the study of literature. Indeed the very rare separation of the study of literature from that of the subjects it deals with suggests the barren and formal character of it. As usually taught for three years to postgraduates in our universities, it is not worth spending three weeks upon." GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH WRITERS "Though I may have lost the habit of reading," says Mr. Moore, "I have acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts." It must be a great pleasure to be Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and opinions that the mind excogitates, and to be able to phrase them with beautiful precision. The mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract other minds and to interest even those that are antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not persuade you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he provokes you to examine your own. He is stimulant, irritant, but there is no depressant reaction from him. One can stand a large dose of him, both of his exquisite fiction and of his repetitive reminiscences, which may or may not be fiction.