's work. The one reminding of a land where it is
always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear
the music of corn-growing, the mystic throes of buds toiling into
blossom; the other of a land where it is always about eight o'clock in
the morning with the dew still on the meadow-grass, and the world
rubbing its eyes and brushing away cobwebs of dream, before buckling
down to the struggle. The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and
crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of
_keff_, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind
holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be
listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its
shepherds:

"'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep,
Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,'

of Pindar, of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing
into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic,
the other beautiful, both symbolical."

With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New
York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in
the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds
in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for
illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace
events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book,
also in his chapter about the Arcadian Club.

"Gentlemen of society, bankers, stylish young men with vast ideas of
personal importance, amateurs and patrons! City Hall is the brain of New
York, of the continent, and it is one of the laws of the world that
brains will rule. Rebel as muscles merely of the body politic, and ye
rebel against inexorable law: that scribbling _literati_ in the fifth
story--for newspapers like men have their brains in the upper story--is
more potent than you in settling the artistic position of a Lucca or a
Rubenstein, a Dickens or a Dore, a Tennyson or a Carlyle. Have ye ever
read a wonderful little ballad by Uhland, entitled 'The Minstrel's
Curse?' If so, recall it--for it is typical, not of that which comes
by-and-by, but of that which is: the exponent of the beautiful having
become in his way an autocrat. Unfortunate it is that journalism is not
always representative of the best culture--that managing editors will
now and then entrust criticism to incompetents, but its popular power i