He is whimsical in his charming little essay on Pepys, an adequate trifle; he is grave and quiet when he writes about Gray; and Swinburne so stirs him that his prose awakes and sparkles with metaphor. Even in this essay, however, he can not help demoralizing poetry by moralizing it into pseudo-philosophic prose. "The imagery (of 'Laus Veneris') has more affinity with modes of sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the attributive in imaginative power than it has with the free vitality that is more properly the sphere of poetry." What does that mean? What is the sphere of poetry? The essays on the older poets would make first-rate introductions to school texts, and I think some of them have been so used. They suffer from the fact that in Mr. Woodberry's time--and since--so many standard essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest were written and rewritten, that unless a critic has a fresh point of view, as Mr. Woodberry has not, another essay is simply another essay. It must be pleasant to meditate on the great men of letters and from time to time write an essay on Virgil or Montaigne or Matthew Arnold. Some leisure is necessary, for the conscientious critic must read much, and much reading takes time. It may be that in our nervous age, in this country, the scholarly critic with a true taste for letters has disappeared, to return perhaps in a day when Democracy or something better shall have dawned. The comfortable old tradition is dead or dying, and since its good works are extant in print, we need no more contributions to it. As Mr. Woodberry says in an essay called "Culture of the Old School": "The _Gentleman's Magazine_--both the name and the thing belong to a bygone time." ABRAHAM CAHAN Toward the end of the last century there appeared in the magazines some remarkable stories of the East Side of New York by Abraham Cahan. They were not of the crudely comic type of Potash and Perlmutter, nor were they in the somewhat finer mood of sentimental humor which made Myra Kelly deservedly popular. They were humorous and pathetic in a quiet, compelling way, with a gentle austerity of tone even less familiar to American readers then than it is in the days of the Russian invasion. Mr. Howells praised these stories and he and others in editorial authority encouraged the author to write more. A career in the pleasant art of fiction was open to Mr. Cahan. But he withdrew from it and, so far as I know, he wrote no more stories for at least ten years. He has devoted his energy to building up the great _Jewish Daily Forward_, which is not only the voice of the East Side, but a powerful vehicle of social and political ideals that have not yet penetrated the sanctums of Times Square and of the older newspaper world near City Hall and Civic Virtue.