Whenever Englishmen have spent a dull evening at the theatre or have sat down to a plum pudding only to find it has too much baking soda, they are apt to speak of King John. They are a great people, the English, and they have long memories, but they lose their perspective all too frequently in the maze of their personal love or hatred. In a comfortable way they think of King John as a potty beggar who through some physiologic error had been born to exist without a heart.

This is, on the whole, quite a serviceable theory, but it omits the rather vital fact that Magna Charta was signed in 1215. It is perhaps not fair to the English to accuse them of such blindness. But for them the man and the charter do seem anomalous companions.

The Vagabond has always liked the picture of the honest, slow, bull necked, barons rumbling down to the waters of Runnymede to defend their rights and the right. All unconscious of the fact that they were transforming English history, interested only in the problems of the day, they confronted the greatest tyrant the nation has ever known and snarled out Magna Charta. The significance of 1215 can be found in Kipling's "The Reeds of Runnymede" which the Vagabond would like to suggest as a comfortable method of absorbing history. Because he knows the lassitude of the mind, he will quote four lines from it which contain the spirit of the document:

"And still when mob or monarch lays

Too rude a hand on English ways

The whisper wakes, the shudder plays

Across the reeds of Runnymede."

Today to get a more scholarly, but equally palatable version of King John's reign the Vagabond will go to hear Professor Whitney in Emerson 211 at 12 o'clock.

TODAY

9 o'clock

"Damped Electrical Oscillations in Single and Coupled Circuits," Professor Chaffee, Cruft Lecture Room.

12 o'clock

"The Gospel according to St. Mark," Professor Lake, Fogg Large Room.

TOMORROW

12 o'clock

"The Greek Revolution of 1830," Associate Professor Lauger, Harvard 1.

"Wordsworth," Professor Lowes, Emerson D.