standards of education under the plea that we must train men for service that blessed word.

"Service!" he cries; "we train the budding mind

Itself to lose and serve all human kind;
A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Come not to college, or no Latin bring."

But there is higher game than the silk-robed tyrant of academic senates, and education was not, and is not, the only field in which the charlatan makes capital of the seductive phrases of idealism. Suppose a convocation in Pope's day was met to settle the affairs of the world and to establish peace and good will among men; suppose then that Pope should read in a most respectable magazine such comment as this on the secret proceedings of the guiding committee: "The task of the three men is made easier for them by the fact that the world gives them a blank check for expenses. No errors they can make, so far as we can imagine, can conceivably compare with the tragic errors of statesmanship before the war." I suspect that the "paper-saving" poet would have used the back of this blank check for other purposes than endorsement. He might have found it a convenient place for asking, not in blank verse, whether this was a particularly happy time for abjuring reason and common sense and critical control, because some one else had blundered. I seem to remember that the "wits" had bad words for the type of egotist and saviour of

mankind, now become so popular among the signers of blank checks.

Behold the statesman, of mankind the friend,
Who claims your vote that wars may have an end;
Lets loose the passions and unchains the storm,
While crying still the blessings of reform.
Peace on his lips and faction in his heart,
Though Europe totter, he will play his part.
He bears no brother near him on the throne,
Who would be saviour of mankind alone.
Fame little reckons what her minions do;
Flatter the mob, the mob will flatter you.

Princeton, N.J.,
I May, 1919

P. E. M.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER