rests on a comprehension of right principles can safely meet such adversaries face to face, and, contrasting the outward show of respectability with the insidious fallacies inculcated, declare unhesitatingly: "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hand is the hand of Esau." Without this power of discrimination the true object of all reading is placed beyond the borders of attainment, the mind is left compassless and rudderless to breast an unknown sea, and intellectual shipwreck follows as inevitably as day follows night.

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We have said that it would be a formidable task to find even "one just man” if literary taste were the sine qua non of justice; but it would be infinitely more difficult to discover anyone who would not freely confess the need of the ability to recognize the true worth of belles-lettres. No one denies that without it the rhetorical, positive assertions of Macaulay would pass muster as history. If I were as sure of one thing as Macaulay is of everything," said a contemporary, "I would count myself lucky." If our minds were placed unreservedly under the influence of the great essayist's writings, might we not become as offensively self-assertive as our master? Without that clear insight the prejudices of Froude would be as reliable as the great works of Gibbon, or the chapters of "Gibbon on Christianity," the products of his envenomed spirit, would carry the conviction of the remainder of his narrative, products of indefatigable study of his subject. Without it.

the charming style of Irving and Goldsmith, Addison and Steele, would not noticeably surpass anything issuing from the pen of the latterday magazine writers, who use words in such a way as to effectually conceal thought, and, in their literary structures, have reduced to a science the practice of making bricks without straw. Is an argument strong, and why is it strong? Is a description true to nature, and wherein lies that truth? Is the portrayal of a certain character skillfully done, and what shows that skill? Does true wisdom shine in this work, or is it "consultus insanientis sapientiae?" Does true wit appear in these lines, and what are its distinguishing features? The men in the past who answered these questions raised literary studies to the dignity of an art, and the present generation can safely build only on the same sure lines of deep erudition.

There is a feeling abroad that a college diploma is essential, and, in fact, the only thing essential, to a reputation for literary taste; but if such were the case keen literary perception would be a drug on the market. All the learning from "Beersheba unto Dan" would not suffice without a literary conscience, that knows the Decalogue and seeks its truth and its spirit in every publication with which it comes in contact. Recognize the ability of a Shelley as we may, his ideas are ever to be viewed with suspicion. To whatever branch of literature we turn, we find metals with the true ring. When Longfellow said:

There is no flock, however watched and tended,

But one dead lamb is there;

There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended,

But has one vacant chair,

the whole world recognized the sincerity of the gentle apostle of resignation, and took him to its breast. A laudable Christian spirit throbs in these lines to the Blessed Virgin by a Protestant author:

Mother, whose virgin bosom was uucrossed

With the least shade of thought to sin allied;
Woman above all women glorified,

Our tainted nature's solitary boast.

It requires only nobility of nature to say with Whittier:

If we have whispered truth,

Whisper no longer;

Speak as the torrent does,

Sterner and stronger.

The parting of Hector and Andromache, the sublime self-sacrifice of Antigone, the life-like characters begotten in the fertile brain of Shakespeare; all these are productions which the literary taste of the civilized world has stamped with its approbation.

How may the average man learn to probe the depths of these grand efforts? By self-discipline, by training his mind to a love of the truthful and the admirable in everything; by studying out the cause of every pleasing effect which a thought produces. This meditation upon an idea is the mother of wisdom, for "knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." The habit of deep study, of re-reading and repeatedly examining every detail of a work, accustoms us to looking below the surface, and shying at the style of those self-assertive writers,

whose ideas, cause a great clatter, but no good. "The man of one book" is as formidable to-day as ever, for, though he has not a passing acquaintance with every nook and corner in the realm of letters, he has a firm grasp of at least a few of the "thoughts which wander through eternity." As an epitome of the reasons for deep study, Tennyson's words will bear repetition: "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."

To be sure, a large part of the reading done has pleasure for its immediate object, but what pleasure is more exquisite than that realized from the ability to commune with great minds whose productions have survived the lapse of time. When a young artist stood before a masterpiece of Michael Angelo, he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "I, too, am a painter." Even if he had been looking merely "for pleasure," would his pleasure have been worthy of mention if he had been stone-blind to the exquisite skill shadowed forth in the work of genius before him? Is the pleasure derived from learnedly discoursing upon a subject to which you are an utter stranger at all commensurate with the satisfaction accruing from a communication with writers whose characteristics you understand, and whose sentiments you cherish? If "a man is no better than the book which he reads," a just regard for one's mental growth should dictate the need of exercising a severe discrimination in all reading, and warn us not to grope blindly toward the light through literature's "ways that are dark and tricks that are vain." P. F. DOYLE, '02.

HOLY CROSS-A REMINISCENCE.

Once upon a wintry morning, while in slumber I lay yawning,
And the college-bell was ringing as it often rang before,
While in happy dreams I slumbered, thro' the matin hours
unnumbered,

Suddenly my bed was shaken,
And I heard the cry "Awaken!"
THAT I heard, but nothing more.

But odd fancies was I dreaming and the golden sunlight streaming,

Thro' the window, on the floor,

With its hues prismatic changing, where the icicles were hanging,

Told my philosophic reason
That of all the winter season

No day colder came before.

Finished wisdom's short conclusion, came I to the resolution That I would the bell ignore

So to sleep again I turned me, for Morpheus never spurned

me,

And in Dreamland went I straying,

With hobgoblins round me playing,
To the fairy scenes of yore.

Happy visions, dearer seeming, haunted me in fancy dreaming

All my boyhood's treasures o'er,

And no thought of coming sadness marred my stolen slumber's gladness:

Thus oblivious I lay yawning,

Thro' the long hours of the morning
Hoping sleep would strength restore.

But at last, repentant sinner, I arose to seek my dinner,

And the lower corridor,

For I feared some lynx-eyed prefect longer absence might

detect: