In the hourly prints of the day we pick up, at every turn in the city, on hoardings, on every theatre bill board, in the shop windows--everywhere the triumphant, glorious and illustrious Harlot of the day or season, in one of her many roles, as dancer, actress, singer, society woman, erotic novelist and the rest, confronts us in her overwhelming and audacious supremacy of finery, wealth, comfort and the adulation of the community. We get her triumphs, her person, her biographies, her lovers, her scandals, her clothes and her character (these are all about the same, too) with the painstaking detail of sober history. Some of the queans, who have discovered the secret of perpetual rejuvenation, we cannot escape by any chance. These we seem doomed to get forced upon us forever. There may be great poets, great thinkers, great philosophers and teachers in our contemporary world, but there is no room for them in the tide of current history-making or in the popular interest and imagination. The glorified Harlot alone is worthy to fill the mirror of the time; she alone can warm the cockles of the heart of democracy. It is for this that the great democracy has mastered the three R’s. Aspasia in the full noontide of the greatness of Pericles, Lais just turned into the wonder of the world in the marble of Appeles, and Phyrne made immortal by Praxiteles as Venus rising, rosy, nude and dishevelled from the sea, are wantons who will ever hold the imaginations of men enthralled. But it is certain that in the very meridian of their glory, with poets, philosophers and the greatest artists of history at their feet, their fame never filled the narrow confines of the ancient world as that of the season’s kicking strumpet of the Music-hall fills the modern world with its enlarged boundaries. The fame and name of every fresh bawd from the canaille is now cabled to the four corners of the earth. The notorious harlot of each season’s revels is the female Colossus of the modern world. She is the goddess of the world of traffic. There, aloft, above the reach of all hungry, envious paupers, she rules and overshadows two hemispheres with her legs astride. WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE. WHEN SHAKESPEARE WROTE. When Shakespeare wrote his mighty plays, Superb in action, thought and phrase, He got but meagre vague renown Beyond the wits of London Town:-- To know the great the world delays. Obscure he walked the urban ways: From queen and courtier came the praise, The sneer, the cuff, the smile, the frown, When Shakespeare wrote. But in our modern modish days From sheer caprice the critic slays, Or seeks to put the poet’s crown Upon some pompous pedant clown. No poetasters wore the bays When Shakespeare wrote. A. T. SCHUMAN. A LITTLE COMMENTARY ON CULTURED EUROPE.