The two lists of forty names each of men who are deemed most worthy of a place among the immortals have very little value apart from showing the relative popularity of the men chosen. The fact that the total number of votes cast both by Harvard students and by the reading public reached by a New York literary weekly, was so small makes any choice of names liable to the suspicion of local preferences. If is but natural that men who are about to select a list of names which whey consider of most worth, should be more or less influenced by personal preferences. The only offset to this tendency is, that as the prejudices of the reading public of New York are apt to differ from those of the reading public of Boston, the errors made by a New Yorker will naturally be counter-balanced by those made by a Bostonian. But in the case of the recent vote, the number of votes was entirely too small to permit this influence to have much force. The only influence that can directly be drawn from the vote is that the reading public reached by the journals who took the matter in hand had very little interest in literature other than as a pastime.

The votes, however, do show that the number of college-bred men engaged in literature is still a very large one. It has often been charged that the colleges are rapidly losing their influence in literature as the general standard of education is raised throughout the country. This is held to be the ease, particularly with the graduates of the larger colleges, such as Yale and Harvard. The fact that thirty per cent, of the men chosen by the reading public to represent American literature, received their education at Harvard disproves this statement as far as the graduates of that college are concerned. This result cannot fail to be satisfactory to the graduates of that college, particularly as, with the exception of a few men who were almost unanimously chosen, the votes which elected these men did not come from Harvard. It is by such indications that we feel assured that college men have not yet ceased to be an influence in the world of letters, in spite of the taunts of the outside public.