The _New Cycle_ has changed its name. Being essentially feminine, and this being leap year beside, of course it had a perfect right to do so. The move I understand was made to circumvent the joker who had a way of saying _Wheels_. Neith Boyce did not like this, for she said it was twitting on facts. She even threatened to resign if the name was not changed and a prettier cover used. The manager swore he would never be dictated by a woman, and swearing he would never consent, consented—changing the name (but not its nature) and getting that pretty cover. Phosphorus in editorial rooms is at a premium, and _The Lotos_ (that’s the new name) cannot afford to lose Neith Boyce. * * * * * _The Cosmopolitan_ (not the magazine composed merely of printers’ ink) contains on page 425 of its February, 1896, issue a poem (?) by one Gustav Kobbe, entitled _Obediah Folger_. In _Hundred Choice Selections_, 1872, No. 5, under the title _The Nantucket Skipper_, and in _American Union Speaker_, 1865, as _The Alarmed Skipper_, is the identical story now published by John Brisben Walker as something new! Nothing about it is new except the word combinations. The only possible excuse that I can see is that both the plagiarist-author and his publisher have never been in Boston and never heard of that eminent author and publisher, James T. Fields, (1817-1881), who composed the first poem on this idea. * * * * * It was well enough for Shakespeare to ask “What’s in a name?” seeing that he never realized what his own would stand for in the scroll of time; but do our modern writers who are not satisfied with one, but insist on forcing three and sometimes more names apiece upon public observation, take the same modest view of the significance of a cognomen? Not when there are three or more together, evidently. In short, and let us remember that “brevity is the soul of wit,” the natural inference is that they hold their signature as of more consequence than the screed that follows it. And perhaps they are right in this, though in some cases that is only a left-handed compliment. * * * * * The Revolutionary condition of Literature in America: Old Men sitting in shade on door steps; sometime smoking, always talking: of paper battles won in many magazines; of thrusts with pen; parries with pencil; ink bespattered veterans o’ercome, all in wordy warfare; of merry meetings turned to stern alarums; a so-long manuscript at so-much a page. Then Boys come by detached from Philistinic Hosts: make mud balls; revile; jeer; hiding behind bibelots. These two Factions, the Old and Young; the Senile and the Callow, the Wornout and the Willing: this is all there is to Literature in America. So saith that paper which with rare satire calls itself _Truth_. * * * * *