To all the subscribers to the Memorial fund a copy of this letter was sent, together with a reproduction of the handsome monument, which bears the inscription:- "Erected by American Rhodes Scholars to the Memory of their Friend, Florence A. Crocker. Born Oct. 7, 1859. Died April 6, 1925."

Concerning Ambassadors

HE December number of the magazine of the EnglishSpeaking Union, The Landmark, prints in full the excellent address delivered as the third annual Page Memorial Lecture by the Right Hon. Stanley M. Bruce, Prime Minister of Australia (who has since been entertained in this country), on Armistice Day at Westminster. The same issue contains a descriptive sketch of Canada's First Minister to Washington, Mr. Vincent Massey (Balliol, 19101913), whose wife is the daughter of the late Sir George Parkin of the Rhodes Trust, and who will be remembered by many of the Rhodes Scholars up during his time.

Concerning Periodical Writers

R. M. Field, still apparently attorney at law at 346 Broadway, has recently become a contributing editor of the New York Evening Post and has been given the special department of politics and foreign affairs. The Evening Post's "Literary Review" of November 20 opens with Field's long and excellent discussion of an important book by a fellow Texan, Eight Years with Wilson by David F. Houston, Secretary of Agriculture from 1913 till 1920. In "A Candid View of Mussolini," in the issue of November 27, Field summarizes William Bolitho's Italy Under Mussolini.

A contribution to Blackwood's Magazine of last August by L. M. Jiggitts, entitled "Without Benefit of Law," is a drastic discussion of lynching conditions in the United States. Since 1885 Jiggitts finds that there have been over four thousand lynchings in the country. Only four states-Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island-have clean records for this period.

M.

Camp Bourget

C. BLAKE (New Hampshire and Magdalen, '11) has for several years been employing his summers in an in⚫teresting and useful manner by directing an American Summer Camp for boys in the French Alps. Oxonians who may be abroad with young sons to dispose of will be glad to know of it; the rest may perhaps wish they were themselves young enough to attend. The sixth season will open next July. Blake writes thus from the Hotchkiss School (Lakeville, Connecticut), where he has his winter quarters:

"Bourget is a private summer camp for boys, situated on the shores of Lake Bourget in the Alps of Savoy. American boys who attend schools in Europe have an opportunity at Bourget of spending part of their long vacation with boys and college men from America who are traveling abroad during the summer, while the latter gain a better appreciation of their travel experiences by becoming well acquainted with a typical region on the continent. In addition to most of the best features of the American summer camp, Bourget enables its boys to take excursions to places of historical and architectural interest, as well as of natural beauty, and to hear and speak French. Bourget has no political purpose or affiliation, but it stands for a spirit of friendliness, understanding, and hospitality to boys of France, England, Switzerland, and others nations of good will. Each year a few fine French boys, desiring to make the acquaintance of boys from America, to help them in understanding France and in speaking French, and to practice speaking English, have taken advantage of the opportunity of coming to Bourget.

"Boys from 10 to 13 are juniors, from 14 to 18 seniors. Membership involves an expense of from $375 to $450, and has been limited to twenty-five boys and five counsellors. Our season opens after the close of the European schools, early in July, and continues until the last week in August, thus allowing boys residing abroad to spend part of their vacation with their parents and boys coming from America time for travel before and after Camp. Last summer we enjoyed successful and memorable excursions in the Chamonix-Mt. Blanc region. Being thereby in excellent training, I had the pleasure after the Camp closed of reaching the summit of Mt. Blanc (15,783 ft.) with two guides on a wonderfully clear morning in September—the same day

22

The American Oxonian

that an aeroplane from Geneva dropped supplies for the Vallot observatory by parachute.

"We have already enjoyed visits from some of our loyal ‘old boys,' who now number over one hundred, as well as from many other friends. Bourget goes back in origin and conception to the vacations spent in Savoy and Dauphiné between 1911 and 1914, while I was a Rhodes Scholar, and consequently I am always happy to see Rhodes Scholars who may be reading or traveling in France or Switzerland and care to visit our camp. My summer address is M. C. Blake, Tresserve, Aix-les-Bains (Savoie), France.'

River of Strangers. By Frank Parker Day. Doubleday, Page & Co. 1926. $2.

D

AY'S romance of the Canadian wilds is very pleasant reading. It contains some vivid bits of description and several stirring passages. Two contrasted accounts of the two hundred and fifty mile descent from the remote fur-traders' camp, where the scene is chiefly laid, to the river port are admirably done. One is in winter, with dog-sleds, amid blizzards and wolves; the other, idyllic in tone, is a matter of canoes and campfires, May weather, and the languor of hope deferred. The characters are sharply blocked out: one hero, Scotch, Herculean, free-living, with a heart of gold, a passion for music, and much booklearning; a villain, likewise Scotch, but strictly Presbyterian; a crazy English preacher; and, finally, the perfect lady. I cannot conceal my liking also for the imperfect lady whose name is Rosy. One hears with pleasure that this, Day's first fulllength novel to get into print, is being very well received.

The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists. By Crane Brinton. Oxford University Press. Humphrey Milford. 1926. $5.

In this admirably written monograph, by which Mr. Brinton earned the Oxford Doctorate of Philosophy, he finds opportunity for much ingenious exposition and some rather subtle philosophizing. His purpose is to uncover the background of political ideas which underlay and conditioned the literary work of the period between 1790 and the death of Scott in 1832.

It is the big people mainly that the author examines: to seven of the biggest he devotes the three long chapters that give his book its chief substance. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey are studied as exponents of "The First Generation of Revolt"; then Hazlitt and Scott as a pair of romantic opposites, Whig and Tory respectively; and finally Shelley and Byron as voicing "The Second Generation of Revolt."

A special tact is required in handling a theme like this, which cuts across the alien fields of political theory and aesthetics. The critic must

proceed "with one auspicious and one dropping eye"-the auspicious luminary in regarding Shelley, for example, being the one which considers his work as poetry and the other the eye turned upon his quite deplorable politics. A question that arises in connection with all these writers is whether the politician in them created the poetry or the poet the politics. Though neither alternative would be true, the evidence Brinton sifts rather suggests that the earlier Coleridge-Wordsworth group began with politics, used their radicalism as an intellectual springboard for propelling themselves into poetry, and after achieving the other element straightway forgot their political ardors. Shelley and Byron, on the other hand, farther removed in time from the springs of the revolutionary gospel, began with poetry and then poeticized a political theory of their own, which being their own clung to them all their lives. We might ask which group would have wrought most havoc with conservative government, had they really had the chance of ruling England. I suppose that Byron, for all his romancing about liberty, would have made a pretty safe and sane prime minister, and that even Shelley, in a matter of real business, would hardly have had the idea of applying the principles of The Revolt of Islam. But it would have been a disastrous thing for the policy of Pitt to have had a young Coleridge or Southey in power.

This leads to the question of the practical value of poetical politics. Brinton suggests that by such studies we may get a better notion of what the plain man of the time thought: "The politics of men of letters can frequently give us an insight into the reality behind that fiction, the 'average' man." Naturally he finds this most true of the two writers of his seven who are least remarkable for original genius. "Men like Scott and Southey, although exceptionally gifted in their proper sphere of activity, were politically very close to the ordinary plain citizen." Incidentally, nothing in his interesting book is better than his sympathetic appraisal of the views and personality of these two men. But I am far from sure that the general run of cabinet ministers and political engineers, whose ideas the histories give us, were not quite as close to the homme moyen sensuel as was Southey, to say naught of Shelley.