This is not criticism, but the exaggeration of bitterness; and you, Mr. Braithwaite, should not complain if our lips writhe back at the cup which you have held out to us and if our tongues are twisted to a sincerity that sounds like malice. When _Contemporary Verse_ issued from Philadelphia like an ancient tumbril reconstructed by children we laughed and said, “God speed you while you last.” But when rumors came of a new poetry magazine in Boston we waited with the wonderful hope of eager youth. Ah, the new Poetry Review! The new Poetry Review! And what have you done? You have given us the old doll without even new tinsel. Do you wonder that I would smash your doll and tear its frayed and tawdry clothing? “To serve the art we all love,” you say. Does Benjamin R. C. Low serve it with sentimental buncombe like _Jack O’Dreams_? Does Amelia Josephine Burr serve it with a library tragedy like _Vengeance_? And you, Mr. Braithwaite, do you serve it by writing a muddled article on _The Substance of Poetry_? The bad grammar and proofreading can be forgiven, but who can cleave his way through the jungle of incoherent thought? And I may add seriously that Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, with his puerile remarks about Shakespeare, sounds very much like your younger brother. There is the beginning of service in the competently written criticisms by Messrs. Untermeyer, O’Brien and Colum, and especially in the tantalizing quotations in fine print from Donald Evan’s new book _Two_ _Deaths in the Bronx_. Amy Lowell contributes a short story in her recent colloquial vein and Sara Teasdale a sincere lyric. If live men and women have been sand-bagged and put in the death-cart, let them awake and revive the corpses of their companions. Let them turn the cart into a tally-ho and gallop on with daring and exuberance, cracking a whip at critics. I do not know your age, Mr. Braithwaite, but I feel that I have the wisdom of greater youth. You have not quite killed hope in me, for I know your true devotion to your work. What will you give us in the forthcoming numbers of your magazine? MITCHELL DAWSON. Herbert Tree’s “_Merchant of Venice_” Could I invent some acid, bitter-stinging speech, some new tongue far beyond English in sharpness, I might begin to describe the spectacle of incredible vulgarity—of miserable intent and culmination—which is to be viewed upon the New Amsterdam stage this month. English shrinks—becomes the prattled language of babes—at thought of it. Is the great wind which has blown the dust from the theatres of Germany, bearing Craig and Reinhart and Barker upon its back, echoing even here in America, to be completely discounted, silenced, by this vulgarian, this soulless, thoughtless, casual, shambling buffoon?