ohn Bankes would scarcely have been heard of in our young century if
it had not been for his footman. As Robert stood day by day, sleek and
solemn, behind his master's chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered
into the head of Sir John that his highly respectable name would be
served up to posterity--like a cold relish--by his own butler! By
Robert!

IN the east-side slums of New York, somewhere in the picturesque Bowery
district, stretches a malodorous little street wholly given over to
long-bearded, bird-beaked merchants of ready-made and second-hand
clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, and
rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. One
could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and that
those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of the
doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as you
approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a
most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a coat here
and there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at which you
may become the happy possessor. That dissipates the illusion.

POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it only
were practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to death
every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank,
and is himself instantly arrested and decapitated. The man who suspects
his own tediousness is yet to be born.

WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning automatically
to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocre
verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our
poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture can
bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative
quality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our period
approaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as Michael
Drayton said of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things that the first
poets had."

IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one
man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine
him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and
hearing a ring at the door-bell!

No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an hon