* * * * * Mr. Frank A. Munsey, who prints a picture book, of which eleven million copies are sold every four weeks, declares in a shrill, throaty falsetto that American literature at present is so and so; and that in the future he proposes to have it _so_. Mr. Oppenheimer of Rochester has not yet been heard from. * * * * * I hope no one suspects me of any disrespect toward Mr. Ham Garland of the Chicago Stock Yards, heretofore noticed in these columns. A correspondent reminds me that Mr. G. is favorably mentioned in the oldest records. The historian of the creation remarks “And Ham was the father of Canaan.” * * * * * Chicago’s _Echo_ should be successful. It is taking from the foreign periodicals their very best of picturings and giving us a taste of the delightful fun of _Fliegende Blætter_, _La Rire_, and the rest—a fun which somehow we cannot produce in America, so _Puck’s_ artists and those of _Judge_ and a few others borrow the ideas and we pat ourselves on the back and say what a keen sense of humor we have. We are very funny—we Americans—funnier, by long odds, than we think. I notice, too, that _The Echo_ knows another good thing when it sees it, so the editors have made the printers use my pet grape leaves for the beginnings of their paragraphs. For this compliment to my taste I thank _The Echo_. * * * * * What we are coming to in poetry is always a fascinating theme—like biking in the dark on a strange road. But what we are going away from is more satisfactory to contemplate. It is pleasant to think that Homer, the blind minstrel, and Omar, the tent maker, are fixed facts. They are the poles of verse—one standing for the heroic and romantic, self-unconscious and buoyant, the other for vampire introspection and fatalism which mistakes interior darkness for an eclipse of the universe. It is also consoling to know that such poetry as Francis Saltus Saltus’s “Dreams After Sunset” and Duncan Campbell Scott’s yawp in the August number has been written—for they won’t have to be written again. * * * * * Judge Grant, in commenting on the ways of the Summer Girl in the July _Scribner’s_, says that after her return to her own particular vine and fig-tree she has, among other perplexities, “a considerable uncertainty in her mind as _to whom she is engaged to_.” This is in form somewhat similar to the reporter who said the victim of the trolley accident was killed fatally dead. * * * * *