Tae March Century with its sixteen prose articles and ten poems besides four "Topics of the Time" and four "Open Letters," contains an unusually varied assortment of subjects and styles. The most interesting articles should have been the two on Paderewski, one "A Critical Study," by William Mason, and the other "A Biographical Sketch," by Fanny Morris Smith, but unfortunately the former is so technical in its vocabulary as to be almost unintelligable to one not familiar with musical slang, while the latter, though it contains most interesting facts, many of which have not before been in the possession of the public, is little more than a catalogue of the events of the past life of the great pianist. Mr. Gilder's poem on "How Paderewski Plays" simply states that he might tell us how Paderewski does play if only a great number of brilliant hypotheses, products of Mr-Gilder's vivid imagination, were not "hypotheses contrary to fact."
Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer's article on St. Paul's Cathedral though full of architectural technicalities, is interesting, and must be especially so to students taking Fine Arts 4. It is very liberally and beautifully illustrated by Joseph Pennell, the view of the cathedral from Waterloo bridge, on a foggy morning being especially well drawn. The paper by Richard Rathbun entitled "The United States Fish Commission" gives a very interesting description of a unique department of our government of which we may well be proud; the style is refreshingly free from technicalities and scientific terms.
Of the fiction, "Our Tolstoi Club" by Dorothy Prescott is decidedly the best, if we except the two serials. It is an amusing story, filled with palpable hits at the provinciality and gossip of a Boston suburb. How "Gay's Romance," by the author of "The Anglomaniacs," will turn out, it is hard to say; the first chapters are not uninteresting.
The poetry of the number is poor, with the exception of Aldrich's poem. "My Enemy," by Alice Williams Brotherton, and "Love and Life," by Julie M. Lippmann.
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