A letter from Yale, published in a New York paper, contains a very able contradiction of the general belief that college life is degenerating into a life of athletics, impiety, and social dissipation. The same paper had previously printed a disparaging account of Yale's endeavors to get a new gymnasium and to have an earlier chapel hour, of her holding class Germans, of her crew's having a trainer, of her indulging in chess clubs, and of her having a Glee Club that was to give a concert. We do not ourselves see, in any one of the matters above mentioned, grounds for the charges of irreligion and excessive athleticism and social dissipation, that have been showered down with the customary amount of poor taste and gross ignorance. Harvard has often been attacked on just these same points; and doubtless she must ever expect such attacks as long as their exists a class of writers who are so bold as to write on what they know nothing about, to impart with apparent sincerity, impressions and ideas which are but the outcome of little or almost no study combined with a feverish desire to get in print.

We grant that one of the recent complaints against Yale is justified. She indulges in chess clubs! Such an indulgence is inexcusable, and forebodes the most dire disaster to the college. We have watched with greatest trepidation the rise of these baneful organizations here in Cambridge. Our college chess clubs must go, before parents may feel truly safe in sending their sons to New Haven or Cambridge. But with this one exception we think we can say of the tendencies of college life, with the writer from Yale, that "Our life is neither frivolous nor insincere," and that "there is an undercurrent in it of earnestness and manly purpose which must result in producing men in every way fitted to combat the obstacles of life."