trade for which he felt himself fitted, and devoted eight years to work as a member of the staff of Upper Canada College. In 1899 he went to the University of Chicago, to study economics and political science, was soon appointed to a Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary employment by McGill University, he survived until he took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. "The meaning of this degree," Mr. Leacock has commented, "is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him." He married about that time, and since has belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as lecturer in Political Science, and later, as head of the Department of Economics and Political Science. "As this position is one of the prizes of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high. as to place me distinctly above the policeman, postman, street-car conductors, and salaried officials of the neighborhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of something like equality.”

"I would sooner," Mr. Leacock has said, "have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopædia Britannica." For he believes that the writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough; that a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island are tests involving no great trouble; while to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Of the persons and places in his own books he has said that Mariposa is not a real town, but on the contrary about seventy or eighty towns, that may be found all the way from Lake Superior to the sea; and that the Reverend Mr. Drone is

not one person, but about eight or ten. "To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As for Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and the goodness of his heart,— all of this is known by everybody to be a necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business."

For some time Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons have contemplated adding a Poe and set of Poe to their Library of Modern Authors. But Dickens instead of launching a new edition they decided to bring out in a new form the edition brought out first in 1895, under the supervision of Professor George Edward Woodberry and the late Edmund Clarence Stedman, which lacked little or nothing in its editorial treatment. In glancing through this edition, we chance upon the final answer to a question that was being asked widely in the English newspapers a few years ago. One of the most remarkable chapters in the history of literary anecdote has to do with Poe's exposition of the entire plot of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge from a reading of the first instalment. Every one familiar with Poe's critical work recalls the es

say on Dickens's romance of the

Gordon Riots in which the writer quotes from his own contribution to an issue of the Saturday Evening Post, of Philadelphia, of the previous year. But, English writers began asking a few years.

ago, who has ever seen that original contribution? Mr. Poe, writing after Barnaby Rudge, had run almost its full course, quoted from what he had said at an earlier time, and readers have come to accept his statement without question. But why is that first prophetic paper not to be found in the complete edition of his work? The question was a fair one. But it is set completely at rest in a note appended to the seventh volume of the Scribner edition, in which Professor Woodberry corroborates Poe to the effect that the earlier prospective review appeared in the place and on the date recorded.

Glass has won a wide audience with his stories of the business life and the home activities of the firm of Potash and Perlmutter, but that this audience will relish a departure from the old field is a matter of doubt. Also Mr. Glass's ability to handle a new theme has yet to be proven. In making this comment we have in mind the case of Mr. Peter Finley Dunne. Having discovered Martin Dooley and the philosophy of the Archey Road, Mr. Dunne turned them to account in volume after volume of unflagging interest. But one day he started a series introducing a new character as his mouthpiece. By the time the third paper was written it was found necessary to bring in Mr. Dooley to avert positive disaster. At that the situation was only partly saved. Mr. Glass is as much associated with Potash and Perlmutter as Mr. Dunne was with Mr. Dooley. Can he succeed where Mr. Dunne failed?

both suffered from rheumatism. In The Competitive Nephew it is an asthmatic cough administered to by Miss Meyerson which brings about a solution of the difficult problem of the nephew. "There are in the cloak and suit trade," said Mr. Glass, "some great and wonderful coughs. In a way they become a trademark. I only wish I could describe adequately some of the coughs that I have met in the world of Potash and Perlmutter. Indeed I assure you they would put some of the worst automobile horns out of business."

MARGUERITE MÜNSTERBERG, AUTHOR OF "RED POPPIES"

In a recent issue of THE BOOKMAN, Mr. Glass was quoted at some length upon the literary origin of "Potash and Perlmutter," who are simply composite characters, drawn from Mr. Glass's familiarity with the type. As a lawyer he came in contact with hundreds of just such men as the famous cloak and suit firm, Max D. Feldman, the lawyer, and others. But it is not only the men themselves, it appears, but the customs and institutions among the Jewish people of whom he writes that give his stories their distinguishing mark. Mr. Glass's new book, The Competitive Nephew, departs entirely from Potash and Perlmutter, but is laid largely in the cloak and suit trade, and deals with the same types as did the previous stories.

In The Competitive Nephew there is a bond of sympathy which in a way recalls the O. Henry story Makes the Whole World Kin. There O. Henry showed the bond of sympathy between the burglar and victim when it developed that

and the Novel

While we have produced no work of fiction presenting the evil results of excessive drinking comparable Prohibition to Zola's epic L'Assommoir, American writers, during the past year or so, have been directing their blows rather steadily against what is known as "the saloon interest." First came Mr. Jack London in his semi-autobiographical John Barleycorn, to be followed by Mr. Samuel G. Blythe with The Old Game, and Mr. Will Levington Comfort with Midstream. Now comes Mr. James Hay, Jr., with The Man Who Forgot, which was begun as a prohibition play and then turned into a novel. Mr. Hay, who is the son of Congressman James Hay, the Chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, was born January 28, 1881, at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Most of his childhood, however, was spent in Madison, Virginia, a small town fifteen miles from the nearest railway. From 1894 to 1899 he was at the Clay Hill Academy in Clark County, Virginia, after which he spent four years at the University of Virginia, devoting most of his attention to languages and literature. His original intention had been to pursue

the study of law, but during his college course he became particularly interested in literary subjects. At college he was editor of the University of Virginia Magazine, which is well known as one of the leading under-graduate literary papers, and he was also connected with other college publications.

After leaving the University of Virginia, Mr. Hay went to Washington, where he worked for six months on the Washington Post; and then for six years on the Washington Times. During the latter part of his service on the Times he covered the Capitol for that paper, and this led to his travelling with Mr. Taft for two years (1908, 1909 and 1910). Mr. Hay says that it was Mr. Taft who rescued him from newspaper work by giving him interviews which seemed so obviously to point the way to magazine writing. In 1910 he went to New York to work for the Popular Magazine. Since then he has written extensively for various magazines. March, last, he developed the idea of writing a prohibition play, but after several months attempting to get this produced, he became discouraged and

In

JAMES HAY, JR. decided to make a book of it. Mr. Hay looks back on his activities in this direction with some humour and has written an article entitled The Gentle Art of Not Selling a Play, which pokes fun at the whole wirepulling system by which dramatic productions are arranged.

A Tagore

We are printing on another page an extract from Rabindranath Tagore, the Man and His Poetry, by Basanta Koomar Roy, a Biography book that the publishers declare to be the first biography of Tagore to appear in this country. The author, Mr. Roy, is a young man, who has been in the United States barely seven years, and who has during this time contributed a number of articles on Hindu literature to current magazines. He was graduated from Calcutta University, and taught for two years thereafter in the Anglo-Bengali English High School of Allahabad, India. Upon coming to this country he spent two years at the University of Wisconsin, graduating with his B. A.

degree. Mr. Roy was born in a high caste Hindu family, but sacrificed both caste and social prestige in coming to America, and in adopting American customs. In attaining an American education his aim has been to fit himself to present his native country in lectures and writings to the American public in its true aspect, as he claims that it is thoroughly misunderstood by foreigners. As a personal friend of the poet Tagore, he has had opportunity for acquiring material for his book on the Bengali Nobel Prize winner.