Professor Richard Burton is quite right in the stand he takes against "the half-baked sophistication, juvenile cynicism, indifference," among Eastern students, as the Times puts it, if these things exist in the degree that he thinks they do and they seem to, not only among some undergraduates but among men long out of college who are so devilishly clever that they make on turn with relief to Sanford and Merton. The trouble with these superior, people is that out of the bowels of their own cleverness they spin a web in which hangs nothing but dreary, dessicated warnings to us not to be so devilish clever. When a man has reached the height where he can prove beyond a doubt that Meredith was a bore and Burke a soporific, he has also demonstrated to us common people why he will never write anything himself. We quite agree with the professor on these matters. Seriousness means enjoyment.

But Professor Burton should occasionally give the least touch to the soft pedal and remember that English should be good even in the deep-loined West. He is quoted as saying: "The way Western young folk go after belles-lettres almost suggests that the support of literature in the future will come from those parts." It is a striking picture that the professor draws; this lust for learning this avid, eager eating up of elegance, this relentless pursuit of the humanities. With exultant whoops the Western young folks gulp minor poetry and major essays, studies, sketches, belles-lettres, no more than the snow leopard, the wildcat and lynx, can escape them. As the professor says, they "go after belles-lettres," do the Western young folk, but an East bound down by tradition will wonder why the professor didn't leave it to the furnace-man to express it in just that way. --The Boston Transcript.