To begin with one of the more recent; I have already sent a longer review of John Yeats’ letters to _Poetry_ on the ground that this selection from them contains much valuable criticism of the art to which that periodical is “devoted”. I again call attention to the book for its humanism, for its author’s freedom from the disease of the age. It is good, for America in particular, that some even-minded critic, writing in detachment, without thought of publication, should have recorded his meditations. There can be no supposition that he hoped to start a social reform. Carlos Williams wrote a few years ago: “Nowhere the subtle, everywhere the electric”. Quibblers at once began a wrangle about the subtlety of electricity. We can not massacre the _ergoteur_ wholesale, but we might at least learn to ignore him; to segregate him into such camps as the “New Statesman” and the “New Republic”; to leave him with his system of “graduated grunts” and his critical “apparatus”, his picayune little slot-machine. John Yeats writes as a man who has refused to be stampeded; he has not been melted into the crowd; the “button-moulder” has not remade him. He praises solitude now and then, but he has not withdrawn himself into a pseudo-Thoreauian wilderness, nor attempted romantesque Borroviana. Lest we “of this generation and decade” imagine that all things began with us, it is well to note that a man over seventy has freed himself from the effects of the “Great Exposition” and of Carlyle and Wordsworth and Arnold—perhaps he never fell under the marasmus. I have met men even older than Mr. John Yeats, men who remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century. They had endured the drought, and kept a former age’s richness. When I say “remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century,” I mean that they had received the effect of these writings as it were at first hand, they had got it out of the air; there is a later set who took it up as a speciality, almost a fanaticism; they are different. Then there came the bad generation; a generation of sticks. They are what we have had to put up with. 2 James Joyce’s Novel. _The Egoist, London._ _B. W. Huebsch, New York._