THE editorial articles in the last Advocate have afforded me so much entertainment that I venture to trespass on your columns, to call public attention to some of the extraordinary statements which your contemporary has seen fit to publish I will begin with one or two mistakes which a glance at any official publication would have remedied at once. In the first editorial the new theatre of Memorial Hall is referred to once as "Sanders's Theatre," and once as the "Theatrum." The first name would lead one to suppose that it was a place of public entertainment, where the performances were presumably of a variety character; the last that the word theatre was unknown in our language, pretty much as campus suggests the idea that its pedantic inventors were ignorant of the good old English yard. The facts of the case are, that Mr. Charles Sanders, of Cambridge, left a large sum to the College to go toward the building of an Alumni Hall, that the money was employed in the completion of Memorial Hall, and that the newly erected portion of that structure has received, in honor of Mr. Sanders, the name of the Sanders Theatre.

In another column Gabriel Conroy, the latest work of Mr. Bret Harte, is spoken of as the new story by Rev. E. E. Hale, - a statement which, if true, will probably involve lawsuits and a literary scandal of the first magnitude.

The next thing worthy of remark is the grave statement, on the authority of a contributor whose name is not given, that a German literature, presenting a singularly "wide field for study," existed "at a time long before .... the fanciful poetry of the Minnesingers and noble epics." Some information in regard to the immortal works of German literature prior to the Nibelungenlied

would be of interest to the learned world, and it is to be hoped that the contributor will soon afford it. This same gentleman, growing very eloquent over his subject, remarks that "one might infer, from the absence of an elective in historical German, that there was no literature worthy of study anterior to the eighteenth century"; a statement which seems to show that he supposes that the average man, whom I suppose to be designated by the word "one," is ignorant of the existence, not only of the classics of ancient and mediaeval Europe, but also of the Bible, - a book which the onslaughts of the wise men of our time have, as yet, hardly driven out of sight and out of mind.

In the next editorial the Advocate declares that a knowledge of the opinions of Mr. Herbert Spencer is far more essential to a person who "pretends to a knowledge of Philosophy" than an acquaintance with the works of Aristotle and of Plato. I should have fancied that this was still an open question; but as I am no great philosopher, and as advanced thought is at this moment extremely fashionable, I will not venture to differ from your advanced contemporary.

The last editorial is the most surprising of all. The managers of the Advocate, having discovered that fault-finding is usually a paying article, have done their best to produce a composition that would attract the attention and the money of the College. They know that the more prominent the object of an attack is, the more attention the attack - whatever its merits may be - attracts; and, considering the Faculty of the College to be on the whole the most prominent body in Cambridge, they have attacked the Faculty in a column of what I suppose to have been intended for polished irony. The excuse for their attack is found in certain tickets, recently issued by order of the President and not of the Faculty, which they appear to regard as mere tickets of admission, for everybody connected with the College and for all the friends of such persons, to every entertainment given by the students; and accordingly they bring to bear upon these tickets the whole of the power of invective for which they are so remarkable. An exact copy of the ticket in question may correct any misapprehension under which your readers have labored, and I accordingly send it to you.

HARVARD COLLEGE

Mr. ......................................................................

the bearer of this ticket, is a College officer, and is entitled to enter all College buildings, rooms, and grounds, subject only to restrictions imposed by the Authorities of the College.

............................................ REGISTRAR.

This ticket is not to be given up.

As before the issue of these a College officer could not enter the Yard on Class Day without a ticket from the students, the justice of the measure is hardly to be questioned. The tickets are given to College officers only; and their wives, children, and the strangers that are within their gates derive no more benefit from them than the representatives of the College press, - probably not so much as the Advocate itself.

A paper which enjoys so high a reputation for intellectual and philosophical eminence as does the Advocate will, in all probability, regard with silent contempt any suggestions made to it by so insignificant a person as a contributor to the Crimson. But I cannot refrain from closing my letter with the remark that a paper that desires to have any influence upon public opinion ought to endeavor to maintain some reputation for accuracy; and that if such a paper feels called upon to find fault with a body of men who are at least the social and intellectual equals of its editors, it will find that an exposition of its views, worded in a rational and courteous way, will have far more weight with the College public than a violent attack written in a style of which the best models are to be found in the less reputable dailies of our cities and in the college journals of the far West.

T. L.