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curtain of the great hall window and they stood for a moment, looking out upon the beauty of a perfect moonlight night.
"Really" said the blasé young man apologetically. "Really, now it is a lovely evenin isn't it?"
Just then figures came slowly across the lawn. The young man looked questioningly at the woman beside him. "Oh," she said, answering his gaze, "that is the new servant and her 'young man,' coming home from church."
The new-comers came slowly toward the house The bright moonlight shone upon the honest manly countenance of a young working man, and lighted up the simple, trusting face of the girl. They stopped for a moment under an elm tree at the side of the house. The man stooped and kissed tenderly the upturned expectant face, then walked quickly back across the lawn. The girl turned her happy, smiling countenance toward the house, and disappeared.
"Well ! " ejaculated the blasé young man, "they seem happy."
“Yes,” answered the bored young lady, "she is very young."
The blase young man drawled forth something as he picked up his cane, about "common, low folks" and "stupid, child-like simplicity."
The young woman held out a soft, white hand.
"Good evening," said the blasé young man.
"Good-by," answered the young lady who was bored. A.R.
A Critique of Halo's Constructive Rhetoric.
Mr. Hale's volume on the principles of Constructive Rhetoric is in many prospects unique in the realm of text-books. I think that our first feeling on inspecting this treatise is one of intense surprise. From the first page we perceive that Mr. Hale has abandoned all pretense to formality and all adherence to the usual Gadgrind methods of dealing with the subject. Instead of parading before us innumerable regiments and armies of dull, useless rules, the musty, rhetorical relics of the last three centuries, he talks to us quietly, familiarly, suggestively, like a cultured and loving friend. There is no
dogmatic laying-down of oracular precepts as if the author were the high priest of some mighty Deity of Rhetoric. Impossible as it may seem we have in this rhetoric a text-book that is endurable, yea, even most enjoyable reading.
The book is full of the personality of its author. It seems to the student struggling in the agonies of English composition to come from one who is himself human, who once knew the misery of trying to write when he had no ideas to express, who has himself been through the slow torture of themes and forensics and has not lost all sympathy for those who are now cutting their literary teeth. The average textbook is as devoid of personality and sympathy as is a multiplication table. Let us thank Mr. Hale for the element of sympathy that permeates every chapter of his text. We can fully appreciate it. Let us honor him that he has put forth a book which is not a mere collection of fossil rules.
The literary style of the book is easy and graceful but may be open to one objection. It here and there approaches the danger-line between pure and colloquial English, and there are expressions which are perhaps too conversational and off-hand, yet we can scarcely quarrel with the author because of the freedom and familiarity of his style for it is this very quality that makes the book so interesting and so different from the average formal treatise.
In his method of presenting the principles of literary composition Mr. Hale is equally successful. He recognizes most clearly that writers cannot be manufactured by any process of external moulding. And hence it is that he so strongly emphasizes the constructive element in the study of composition and relegates critical work to the background. He holds, and with excellent reason as it seems to me, that it is better for the student to give a large part of his time to original composition rather than to devote himself to analyzing the productions of other writers, however excellent, or to the correcting of faulty and inferior English. The absence of this last feature from the book has also much to do with making it so enjoyable and