went out to spend the day at Glen View. Mr. Ade's game was as satisfactory to himself as the game of a normal golfer can be, but the series of misfortunes that befell his friend was of a nature to try the temper of the most genial. Not a hazard or a trap on the course that the ball of the unhappy magistrate did not find. Finally human patience could bear the strain no longer, and late in the afternoon, after a particularly exasperating shot, he smashed his clubs, threw away his bag, rushed from the links and took the first train back to Chicago, where he passed a night haunted by visions of monster obstacles and lies in bottomless pits. The next morning, wan-eyed, and in a disgruntled frame of mind, he wended his way to the Police Court and took his seat upon the bench. The first case was called and a dishevelled individual came to the bar.

"Name?" interrogated the magistrate gruffly.

"A. Bunker."

The magistrate started; then glowered grimly. His chance for revenge had

come.

"Sixty days!"

Mr. Booth Tarkington, who with Mrs. "The Beautiful Lady," golfs a little, Tarkington is here shown in Autocar plays tennis a little, and naturally is usually found in the Princeton cheering section at the big game with Yale. The accompanying snapshot of Mr. George Barr McCutcheon was taken at the Exmoor Country Club, Highland Park, near Chicago. He is a member of several country clubs, but as he modestly expresses it, Exmoor is the only course on which he has had "the nerve to play." Mr. McCutcheon follows with pride the achievements of Chicago's baseball teams, and rises to heights of impassioned eloquence when explaining to Eastern friends what the 'varsity elevens of the Middle West, such as Michigan or Minnesota, would do to the "Big Four" of the effete East in the event of intersectional meetings on the gridiron. Long before The Leopard's Spots was ever thought of, Mr. Thomas Dixon had attained a reputation for bird-shooting that

was positively national. From his beautiful home at Elmington Manor on the Virginia coast he makes each year duckhunting excursions on the waters of the Chesapeake, and in The Life Worth Living has shown his keen interest in houseboats and naphtha launches. Just at present he seems to be in the throes of the prevalent automobile fever. No reader of Dr. Henry Van Dyke's books would have to turn to a Who's Who to learn of his prowess as a fisherman, and the picture of Owen Wister on horseback is no surprise to any of the several hundred thousand persons who enjoyed The Virginian, although there is a certain something in the correctness of attire that perhaps smacks too much of the civilisation of Harvard Square and prim old Philadelphia. Mr. Irving Bacheller devotes a good part of the year to outdoor life. He has a camp in the range of the Stillwater Club, in the very heart of the North Country of his popular novels, and finds relaxation from work where the deer rustle through the woods and the streams are full of golden trout. Mr. Stewart Edward White generally manages to find his way back from mountain

and forest in time for the football season. As a University of Michigan man, he is, of course, sceptical of Eastern prowess and attends the big games about New York preserving the calm and judicial deportment of an unbiased spectator. Yet to lay aside dignity and aloofness at times is only human, and one November day at New Haven, two years ago, Mr. White must have caught some of the contagious enthusiasm of the Princeton stands in which he had been sitting, for after the game he was seen executing a very respectable cakewalk across Yale field in apparent appreciation of De Witt's historic goal from the field.

sure, adventure stories, but they were commonly regarded as depraving, and the only righteous course was to read stories which diluted botany or the Golden Rule or setched the lives of excellent young people who came to an early death-apparently from catching cold by going about in a chilly world with nothing on their little consciences. "Seven weeks before little Nellie died," began one of these genial narratives, and in the next chapter it was six weeks, and in the next one five, and so on, with inverted chronology, reckoning backwards from the

by President Roosevelt's praise of Mr. Robinson's Children of Children of the Night. There are, of course, many poets of the Robinson degree, but the President is not to blame if he has encountered only one of them. It is well known that he has had a number of other matters on his hands of fully equal importance. Probably he is not even aware of the present poetical situation. Our poetry-shelf, which is about four feet long, is alternately filled and emptied three times a year. Not all the volumes of verse are sent to the newspapers and magazines, but on the average it is safe to say that any literary editor summarises, or assigns for review, or in some way disposes of twelve feet of minor poetry annually. Three-fourths of this is tinged with the "certain, sad mysticism" detected by the President in Mr. Robinson's verse, and one-half of it is almost if not quite Robinsonian in merit. The more anxious one is lest a genius may escape him, the more he will read, and from much reading he will, in spite of himself, grow callous. Hence, cold and routine methods of dealing with the problem have developed in editorial offices.

There are what may be called the spring and fall house-cleanings, when bales containing the verse of several months are shipped to men who are thought to possess richly emotional temperaments. The consignee then reads, one after the other, seventy or eighty volumes of heart's ease and heart's desire, despairs, loves, cradlesongs, moonbeams on the water, and negro lullabies. Numb and bewildered, he picks out six or twelve, according to the length of the article, and for each one mentioned passes over a score with a formal expression of regret that there is no room for them. Hence those strangely chosen groups of poets you find despatched at intervals by reviewers in the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. Novelists may receive individual attention. Poets are always handled in bulk and reviewed in dozens and half-dozens. A reviewer would as soon think of going off with one minor poet as of buying one egg. From this may be inferred the difficulty of reading the lines quoted by the

President with anything like the President's astonishment. Under present conditions that first first fine relish is not for any rhyme-worn veteran, but for the men who are the busiest in other things, for the chance half hours of overworked executives. It is they who make these discoveries. Try as we will to overtake all fugitive verse of fair quality, an occasional Robinson still gets away. With creditable poets arriving in each mail, the thing cannot be prevented.

A Study of Mr. C. G. D. Roberts.

If Mr. Robinson had been a Canadian, such an oversight could not have occurred. It is likely that a special treatise would be devoted to him by Professor James Cappon of Queens University, Kingston, who is at present engaged on a series of Studies in Canadian Poetry. The first volume, entitled Roberts and the Influences of His Time, has already appeared, and from the thoroughness with which Mr. Roberts's poetry is analysed and appraised, it is evident that nothing Canadian will pass unmentioned. would be hard to take Shakespeare more seriously. In young manhood, it seems, Mr. Roberts was of the school of Keats,

It

but Greek legend held him only for a time.

Then followed the "poetry of Nature," not without certain affinities to Wordsworth, and after this came "songs of the common day," in which Wordsworthian influence is still discernible. Then a period of reflection set in. Here we find a little Shelley now and then. Everything went on in an orderly way, one poet after another exerting their wholesome influence on his work, and, as the writer says, "Who knows but some day that ardent, aspiring genius of his, which has tried so many forms, might at last have found a supreme one and produced an immortal song?" But in 1896 occurred the migration of Mr. Roberts to New York, and from that moment he fell under the influence of Rossetti, Swinburne and even Beaudelaire and became almost improper and wrote lines that "had the full red of the erotic chord." The intricate relations of the poems Mr. Roberts has written to the poems Mr. Roberts has read are traced with the utmost care. The author takes nearly as great pains to point out the resemblances between Mr. Roberts and other poets as a commentator in an edition of the Prometheus recently issued, who not only produces any number of passages from Greek and Latin writers that seem to resemble the lines of Eschylus, but quotes similar sentiments from the poets in half a dozen modern languages. Eschylus happened to be read by the poets who resembled him, while Mr. Roberts happens to resemble the poets he has read, but this is a detail affecting only the question of originality, and the fact remains that Mr. Roberts is a Canadian.

The writer tells us that it seems probable, from his clinical experience, "that certain predispositions towards particular lines. of study are the symptoms of a neurotic state," and he cites three cases, all treated and cured by himself, in which the morbid mental conditions were not caused by overstudy, worry or dissipation, but were the natural outgrowth of "early inclinations" sown on an "unrecognised psychopathic soil." The patients were all students of literature and language and disinclined to physical exertion. The first, who is now a professor of Romance languages in an Eastern colrege, took no interest in athletic contests in his youth, and even now "he will avoid, if possible, gymnasium work." The second "did not join in college sports" and passed through his college course in a "nugatory physical manner." The third had a large body, large organs, and great lung capacity, and allowed them all to remain idle. Upon approaching middle life, all three developed symptoms of melancholia, two of them took to drink, and one lost the power of understanding anything he saw in print. Hence it appears that "the psychopathic conditions" "direct certain individuals to work hard along the lines of their least mental resistance.' To the layman nothing could be more puzzling. In the first place, there is the difficulty of seeing how any generalisation can be based on the three instances, and in the second place, there is the flat refusal of this generalisation to yield any meaning to his mind. Physically inert young men sometimes become janitors, bookkeepers, lawyers, clergymen, and members of Congress. There must be as many as three morbid ones among them. Gather seven neuropathic bank clerks, trace them back to a sedentary youth, show that they passed through school in a "nugatory physical manner" (as bank clerks often do) and then you have the law of the psychopathic origin of bank-clerking, which outdoes the law of neurotic predisposition to advanced scholarship by seven to three. As to the "line of least mental resistance," it is followed not only by the professor of Romance languages, but by the young men who cut his lectures, and they, too, may at some time go to pieces, and if