Webster's International Dictionary. Invaluable in Office, School, and Home. Successor of the "UNABRIDGED." Standard of the United States Government Printing Office, the United States Supreme Court, the State Supreme Courts, and of nearly all the Schoolbooks. Warmly commended by State Superintendents of Schools, and other Educators almost without number. THE BEST FOR EVERYBODY BECAUSE It is Easy to Find the Word Wanted. Words are given their correct alphabetical places, each one beginning a paragraph. It is Easy to Ascertain the Pronunciation. The pronunciation is indicated by the ordinary diacritically marked letters used in the schoolbooks. It is Easy to Trace the Growth of a Word. The etymologies are full, and the different meanings are given in the order of their development. It is Easy to Learn what a Word Means. The definitions are clear, explicit, and full, and each is contained in a separate paragraph. G. & C. MERRIAM CO., PUBLISHERS, JOSEPH GILLOTT'S STEEL PENS. GOLD MEDALS, PARIS, 1878 AND 1889. His Celebrated Numbers, 303-404-170-604-332 And his other styles, may be bad of all dealers throughout the World. JOSEPH GILLOTT & SONS, NEW YORK. The Boorum & Pease Company, MANUFACTURERS OF THE STANDARD BLANK BOOKS. (For the Trade Only.) Everything, from the smallest Pass-Book to the largest Ledger, suitable to all purposes-Commercial, Educational, and Household uses. Flat-opening Account-Books, under the Frey patent. FACTORY: BROOKLYN. CHEMISTRY. P. Blakiston, Son & Co. beg to call the attention of teachers to the following educational works now used in a large number of schools and colleges. RICHTER. Inorganic Chemistry. Fourth American Edition by Smith. $1.75. RICHTER. Organic Chemistry. Third American Edition. (Preparing.) CALDWELL (Prof. G. C., Cornell College). Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis. Third Edition. $1.50. BLOXAM. Chemistry, Inorganic and Organic, with Experiments. Eighth Edition. $4.25. SMITH (E. F., University of Pennsylvania). Electro-Chemical Analysis. Second Edition. $1.25. SMITH and KELLER. Experiments in General Chemistry. Third Edition. 60 cts. SUTTON. Volumetric Analysis. Seventh Edition Improved. (In Press.) LEFFMANN. Examination of Water for Sanitary and Technical Purposes. Third Edition. $1.25. LEFFMANN. Analysis of Milk and Milk Products. $1.25. All of the above books are illustrated, with the exception of Caldwell. Special Catalogues of books on CHEMISTRY, HYGIENE, MEDICINE and the Collateral Sciences will be sent upon application. Our list includes a number of important REFERENCE BOOKS on these subjects suitable for school and college libraries. Correspondence solicited. P. BLAKISTON, SON & CO., FRENCH BOOKS. Readers of French desiring good literature will take pleasure in reading our ROMANS CHOISIS SERIES, 60 cts. per vol. in paper and 85 cts. in cloth; and CONTES CHOISIS SERIES, 25 cts. per vol. Each a masterpiece and by a wellknown author. List sent on application. Also complete catalogue of all French and other Foreign books when desired. WILLIAM R. JENKINS, Nos. 851 and 853 Sixth Ave. (48th St.), NEW York. THE BOOK SHOP, CHICAGO. SCARCE BOOKS. BACK-NUMBER MAGAZINES. For any book on any subject write to The Book Shop. Catalogues free. Sent, mail prepaid, on receipt of price. HARVARD UNIVERSITY SUMMER SCHOOL. July 3 to August 13. Thirty-four courses will be offered. For pamphlet giving full information, apply to the Clerk of the Committee, M. CHAMBERLAIN, Cambridge, Mass. THE BOSTON FOREIGN BOOK-STORE. A complete stock of French, German, Italian, and Spanish standard works. New books received as soon as issued. Large assortment of text-books in foreign languages. Complete catalogues mailed free on demand. CARL SCHOENHOF, (T. H. CASTOR & CO., Successors), Importers of Foreign Books, MACMILLAN & COMPANY'S NEW BOOKS. EDITED BY MR. GLADSTONE. THE WORKS OF JOSEPH BUTLER, D. C. L., Sometime Lord Bishop of Durham. Divided into Sections, with Sectional Headings, an Index to each Volume, and some Occasional Notes; also, Prefatory Matter. Edited by the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE. Two vols., demy 8vo, cloth, $7.00 net. Vol. I., ANALOGY, etc. Vol. II., SERMONS, etc. BROWNING AS A PHILOSOPHICAL AND ENGLISH MEN OF ACTION. DUNDONALD. By the Hon. J. W. BY THE POET LAUREATE. THE POETICS OF ARISTOTLE. Translated, with a Critical Text, by S. H. BUTCHER, Litt.D., LL.D., Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of University College, Oxford. 8vo, cloth, pp. 105, $1.00 net. ENGLAND'S DARLING. By ALFRED AUSTIN, Poet Laureate. With Portrait. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. ECONOMIC HISTORY OF VIRGINIA IN THE XVIIth CENTURY. An Inquiry into the Material Condition of the People, Based upon Original By PHILIP ALEXANDER BRUCE, author of "The Plantation Negro as a Freeman," and Corresponding Secretary of the Virginia Historical Society. 2 vols., crown 8vo, cloth, $6.00 net. "A book that may fairly be termed unique from the viewpoint of exhaustive research in its particular field."-The Sun. MACMILLAN & COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. No. 232. THE DIAL A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information. FEBRUARY 16, 1896. Vol. XX. CONTENTS. RECENT BOOKS OF AMERICAN POETRY. William Morton Payne . Lowell's Last Poems.-Thoreau's Poems of Nature. -Smith's Poems of Home and Country. - Washburn's The Vacant Chair and Other Poems. - Mrs. Stoddard's Poems.-Mrs. Fields's The Singing Shepherd.- Lawton's Folia Dispersa.- Dole's The Hawthorne Tree. Miss Litchfield's Mimosa Leaves.Miss Coolbrith's Songs from the Golden Gate.- Miss Shearer's The Legend of Aulus. - Horton's In Unknown Seas. McGaffey's Poems. Gunsaulus's Songs of Night and Day.—Mrs. Coonley's Under the Pines. Mrs. Nason's The Tower. - Savage's First Poems and Fragments.-Hayes's The Old-Fashioned Garden.-Roche's Ballads of Blue Water. - O'Conner's Poems.- Lindsey's Apples of Istakhar.- Burton's Dumb in June. - Miss Cocke's A Doric Reed. - Miss Johnson's The White Wampum. The Magic House.-Carman's Behind the Arras. BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS . Scott's The frescoes of the Vatican. A romance from the world of butterflies. - Stories and sketches of New Orleans. - Fallacies of race theories. A sidelight upon Renan.-"The Midsummer of Italian Art.”A short account of modern German literature.-Wild places in England.-A Southern school history.-Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. - Mr. Julian Ralph's Southern sketches. BRIEFER MENTION LITERARY NOTES 108 109 € 110 116 120 120 121 121 A UNIVERSITY SYMPOSIUM. The rapid growth of some of our larger universities has given much prominence, during the past few years, to the question whether they should retain their present form of organization, simply expanding upon the old lines, or seek to reconstruct themselves upon a basis better fitted to meet the needs of their enlarged bodies of undergraduate students. In other words, it has become a serious question to decide whether the system which has worked so admirably in dealing with hundreds should not give place to some system planned with express reference to the wants of thousands. In trying to answer such a question, we naturally look to the Old World, where universities with thousands of students are not uncommon, and ask if some modification made with the best European models in view may not be worth undertaking in the case of our own larger institutions. In this survey of the problem as it exists elsewhere than in the United States, attention is, of course, chiefly attracted to Germany and to England to the former country, because so many of our educators have got their training and inspiration there; to the latter because it is a priori probable that the main trunk of the English race has developed the university ideals most likely to find acceptance in any community the offshoot of that race. The New York "Evening Post," in a recent issue, presents a very interesting account of the English university system, written with reference to its possible adoption, or rather adaptation, in the United States. This account is accompanied by a collection of views expressed by members of the Harvard and Yale faculties, examining the subject in its general aspects, as well as from a number of special standpoints. While these expressions of opinion are far from approaching unanimity, they make it evident that the existence of a very real and pressing problem is felt, and that the English university system, or certain features thereof, may turn out to offer us the best solution. The feeling at Harvard, more noticeably than the feeling at Yale, seems to favor the English idea, without, however, giving any countenance to the notion that an acceptance en bloc of the En glish plan of organization would be either practicable or desirable. To begin our discussion with a few figures, the latest statistics show an enrolment of 3358 students in the Oxford colleges and halls, of 2795 students in the Cambridge colleges and hostels. Against these figures we may set 3600, the total enrolment at Harvard University, and 2415, the total enrolment at Yale University. The problem is, then, quantitatively much the same in both countries. At the English universities, these six thousand odd students are members of something like forty colleges, each having its own foundation, its own buildings, its own corps of instructors, and its own discipline. Trinity at Cambridge has over six hundred students; no other college at either university has as many as three hundred, and a dozen or more have less than one hundred each. We need hardly add the information that the colleges have nothing to do with honors or degrees, except to prepare candidates for these distinctions, as awarded respectively by the University Senate at Cambridge, and Convocation at Oxford. In our two American universities, on the other hand, half of the students are enrolled in the special or professional schools (which to a certain extent embody the English college idea), while the other half belong to Yale College and Harvard College, 1199 to the former, 1771 to the latter. The central difficulty is in these two overgrown colleges, still organized upon a plan admirably adapted to the hundreds of a generation ago, but not equal to the demands made by the greatly increased numbers of the present. It will be seen that this educational difficulty is analogous to the political difficulty with which the larger centralized governments of to-day are forced to contend. The French Republic, for example, or the English monarchy, suffers in a hundred ways from over-centralization. A system that was once fairly adequate is found sadly wanting in this age of multiplied special interests and local self-assertion. The elasticity of the federal system, as displayed in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland, stands in striking contrast to the rigidity of the system which heaps all the work of government, in matters both large and small, upon the shoulders of a single set of officials. Many a philosophical observer in France or England, while not blind to the faults of the federal organization of the United States, has cast longing glances in our direction, and recognized the fact that our Federal system, in spite of the imperfections of its working-out, embodies the political ideal toward which the larger governments of the world are inevitably tending. This is the real explanation of such experiments in English politics as county and parish councils, and even of the mismanaged Home Rule movement. That movement failed, as it deserved to fail, because it aimed to institute local government in but a single part of the United Kingdom, and because it sought to bestow a dangerous degree of political power upon the people of Ireland; but the decentralizing principle upon which the movement was based is a sound one, and so profound an observer as Matthew Arnold gave frequent testimony to its validity. Applying our analogy to the educational question now under discussion, it will readily be seen that the English university represents the federal type of organization, while the American university illustrates the centralized system, once entirely adequate, but now so overgrown as to have become unstable from its own weight. And just as it would be theoretically possible for the English government to transform itself into an artificial reproduction of the system which in the United States has been a product of natural growth, so it would be theoretically possible for Harvard University, let us say, to create a system of colleges corresponding, in most of the essential respects, to the Oxford colleges which began as independent foundations, and afterwards became merged in the aggregate which is known. as the University of Oxford. This, stated in terms of the broadest generalization, is the question which has now reached, both at Harvard and Yale, the stage of discussion in which an ideal becomes something more than a mere counsel of perfection, and is brought within the range of the practicable. A thoughtful paper by the late Frank Bolles may be said to have set the ball of discussion rolling, and the expressions of opinion now brought together by the "Evening Post" symposium show us the discussion in its present state. The more conservative find many difficulties in the culties in the way of reorganization upon the college basis. Their objections relate mainly to discipline, the division of endowment funds, the duplication of teaching, and the weakening of loyalty to the university. These objections are all worth considering, but it is evident that no one of them offers an obstacle to reform in the nature of the case insuperable. And it is equally evident that some sort of compromise in all of these matters would be found view than a university-bred man should have, while the class organization and fraternal feel necessary. As one of the Harvard instructors puts it, there can be no question of adopting the English system as a whole, but only a questioning, long since killed by the elective system of of adapting its best features to our own use. 66 studies and the large number of students, is In the matter of discipline, our universities soon to be definitely buried by the inevitable now occupy a middle ground between the "mo- adoption of a three-years course in some form nastic" English methods and the extreme or other." It may be worth while, in closing this freedom allowed to students in Germany. If presentation of an interesting discussion, to call an improvement is to be made here, it should attention to the fact that the organization of the probably be in the English rather than the Ger- University of Chicago carries the division of man direction, but need not go to the extent of faculties and student-bodies a little farther than gating" and compulsory chapel. As far as it is carried elsewhere, and that the several the question of endowments is concerned, it "halls," which constitute one of the most disshould not be impossible or even extremely diftinctive features of this institution, are, to a ficult to make an equitable allotment to the limited extent at least, like the colleges of an several colleges, should such be organized. The English university. That is, they provide a cerdivision of teaching should probably not be tain amount of discipline and self-government, carried nearly as far as at Oxford and Cam- of personal relation between students and inbridge, both because the expense of the En- structors, and of social intercourse; and, in so glish system is very great, and because the far as they provide these things, they approach range of the student under that system is un- the type that the advocates of the English colnecessarily narrowed to the courses he can get lege system have in mind. within the walls of his own college. A wise adjustment of this matter of teaching would go far to remove whatever force there may be in the argument that the English system stimulates loyalty to the college at the expense of loyalty to the university. On the whole, the subject seems to be one eminently open to discussion, with the balance of argument inclining a little toward the college idea. The positive pleas made for that idea are forcible, to say the least. The present system is said to result in something like "social chaos," under which, as Mr. Bolles wrote, a man might possibly be "a living, hoping despairing part of Harvard College," eating, sleeping, studying alone, and "not even having the privilege of seeing his administrative officers without having to explain to them who he is and what he is." This plaint is amplified with a good deal of force by the Harvard correspondent of the "Evening Post," who uses the following language: "Plainly, the oldfashioned idea of a student's benefitting by contact with and the example of his teachers and officers outside the lecture-rooms is at present relegated to the past, and the proof of that, if any were needed, is to be found in the utterances of graduates of thirty or forty years ago in regard to their teachers, as compared with those of graduates of recent years. One hears, too, constant complaint that the men are liv ing their lives in smaller groups, coming less and less into contact with one another, and so leaving Cambridge with a narrower point of COMMUNICATIONS. THE PROBLEM OF THE "YOUNG PERSON" (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) The problem of the freedom of literary expression is, as THE DIAL intimates in its last issue, a "vexatious one; but I think it must be more clearly apprehended that its vexatiousness lies largely in the fact that it is distinctly a two-fold problem: first, as to the scope of literary art; and second, as to its dissemination,— or, in other terms, the problem of the "Young Person." As to the first problem, we must remark that literary art, like all art, was in its origin lyric and hortatory; the love-song proceeded from and excited to love, the war-story was the expression of and incitement to war. And, in fact, every representation by early art was avowedly to stimulate the action represented, and so if the action was evil, the art also was evil. But while lit erary art was primitively excitement and incitement, in our day it has attained a high degree of dramatic and psychological objectivity, and even depicts innocently and artistically the coarsest sexuality. Thus, Zola deals with plete artistic objectivity. "La Terre," for instance, is the most licentious subjects without allure, but with com a powerfully artistic realization of the typical force and significance of the coarsest peasant sexuality, which is invested with a certain large esthetic interest comparable in its kind with that which Millet's paintings throw about the peasant as sodden toiler. But Zola should make the history of the typical prurient reader of his works the subject for a novel. Every fact, then, so general as to be of typical significance, objective art can dignify and glorify. Art sounds all the depths as well as all the heights of life; it treats impartially the lowest animalism and the grossest crime, as well as the loftiest aspiration and the noblest endeavor. The "Edipus Tyrannus" of Sopho |