The Vagabond, returning to his proper business after a too long sojourn in fields remote, has been meditating on certain great men of the past. He has run his eye over the scroll of worthies, all great men in their time, sons of thunder, shakers of the earth,--and now forgotten. Like all of the Vagabond's musings, this one had an external stimulus and efficient cause, though the upshot is as the spirit listeth. For the Vagabond has been casually reading some minor English poets, men whose names are known to all, their works to none, or whose immortality is frailly linked to a note in a textbook, a piping lyric in an old anthology. The thought came to him that all these men, whom we read now with a bored condescension, were once the laureates of a period or a nation, whose fame was certain. Nearly every poet we admire today had rivals who overpeered him in his own lifetime. Today even their names are forgotten. Who was the author of "Mucedorus"? In Elizabeth's reign that invertebrate play was the delight of the groundlings who clamored also for "Faustus" and the tragedy of Lear; it could not be staged too often. "Mucedorus" was reprinted twenty times, and was even attributed, by some master of irony, some unhonored Voltaire, (also, alas! unknown) to Shakespeare. But perhaps the author of "Mucedorus," the Edgar Wallace of his time, never aspired to Valhalia. . . Let us summon from Limbo instead the wraiths of John Gower, quondam peer of Chaucer; and of Stephen Hawes, his disciple: let us read the "Lament for the Makirs," and marvel.

And the Vagabond reflects that not even greater men are exempt from the blight. On his own bookshelves reposes the embalmed corpse of the "Faery Queene," which later on of course he means to read. But not just yet. He will take it up someday, with the tragedies of Ben Jonson, and also "Paradise Regained." And Pope. In the eighteenth century the little man in black, with the twisted shoulder and the twisted smile, was the terror as well as the delight of London. A single translation made him rich; he was bribed to write and believed to be silent. Pope had a full quiver, and all his barbs went home. Today he is damned, even by the now enthusiasts for Dryden, and not even with faint praise. The Vagabond in fact is making a pilgrimage to Sever 11 where Professor Greenough is speaking on Pope, principally to see a man who has actually read not only the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Dunciad," but even "Windsor Forest" and the Epistles. The occasion will be a salutary reminder of several important platitudes about time.

It is said that a certain Elizabethan poet, a rugged fellow and something of a cynic, ordered that a Latin inscription be carved under his name on his tombstone, which translated reads: "Dedicated to Oblivion." The Vagabond, like a bad preacher, has put the text at the end of the sermon, but perhaps it can pass for a moral as well.

TODAY

2 O'Clock

"Pope," Professor Greenough, Sever 11.