The Beta Theta Pi - November 1883

THE BETA THETA PI.

POEM

BEFORE THE 44TH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE FRATERNITY, SARATOGA, AUG 30, 1883".

I.

When God, from out the lightning and the thunder, Upon tlie mountain's brow, Gave to the prophet that great law whereunder His chosen ones must bowWrit higher in that Scripture's sacred story, And held by Him above All other law - shone in resplendent glory The sweet, strong law of Love.

II.

When the sad, passionate twilight shadows blending Closed down the mountain-side Whereon the sacrificial blood was spending When Christ was crucified, The last words ever borne to ear of mortals There from God's wounded Dove, Before He passed up through the sinless portals, Breathed the sweet thought of Love.

III.

From orange groves, from vine-clad hills of summer, From colder northern lands : From the blue waves that softly sing and murmur On Californian sands; Here, in obedience to that law of heaven, Perfect, divine, completeThat mandate to the world of her God- given, Bound in love's chains we meet!

IV.

With full hearts beating high with exultation· For the fair land which stands

A sign for age from nation unto nation Over all other lands, From mountain wilds, from immemorial rivers, From inland and from sea, We meet to give thanks to the Prince of Givers That He hath made us free.

VoL. XI. NOVEMBER, r883.

Ah! though across the wide Atlantic water We catch the weakened cry Of fainting men 'mid carnage and red slaughter , Who rail at God and die; Where, as amid the lights on dome and steeple Their trampled manhood moans, Men hear, above the wailing of the people , The crash of falling thrones ;

VI.

Yet we being free, and linked in love's devotion Beneath this western sky, ·where peace smiles sweet from ocean unto ocean Bend to no flags that flySave one which knows no monarch's high dominion , Whose silken folds are fanned By the broad winds that stream from freedom's pinion Across the kingless land!

VII.

And though long since our land was hot with battle ; And field and hill and wood, Echoing with sabre clang and musket's rattle, Ran red with hero blood; And life-blood from the nation's heart was spouting, And men could hear afar " The thunder of the captains and the shouting" Over the din of war.

VIII.

Yet now the battle's heavy smoke has faded In mist and light away, We know that bitter death-lo eked conflict aided To link the blue and gray In bonds, which, binding one heart to another, Give us that supreme grace To hold men close as brother unto brother, \Vho once stood face to face.

IX.

What are the tokens, then, we bring, my brothers, To this fair feast of soul? ' Are they not those things taught us by our mothers, Which grow not ever old ? How duty done is duty's sweetest guerdon; How courage, truth, and faith Shall help us better bear life's heavy burden Toward the peace of Death?

X.

The secret mysteries old times have taught us Around the inner shrine, The comfort that a brother's band -clasp brought us, The memories half divine,

Wherewith life's pathway as we tread is brightened, Life's sorrows made less drearThese shall not fade until our souls are lightened In a diviner sphere. ·

XI.

And in the heavenly fields beyond the River Where life is always young, Doubt not that we shall hear the echoing quiver Of songs our boyhood sung; Doubt not that these sweet bonds of earthly making Shall knit us closer still When on our eyes the eternal lights are breaking, When our glad hearts shall thrill

XII.

Beneath the clear, calm eyes which closed in sorrow Upon the blood-stained tree, To open to an everlasting morrow Of glad eternity.

0, doubt not then, my brothers, in that glory Around-beneath-above, Shall coine the full fruition of our story, The perfect flower of Love!

XIII.

But till that time shall come spare no endeavor To lift the banners highTo make the name ap.d meaning pure forever Of Beta Theta Pi ; To show unto the world how faith and, duty, Followed by night and day, Can make her mystic symbols blaze with beauty Which shall not pass away.

XIV.

Be steadfast to the high trust in your keeping, Be watchful and be true, Let not the serpent apathy come ·creeping Between that trust and you ; Follow the paths where Wooglin ' s hands have pointed With never-swerving feet, And you will rest at last with God's anointed, Where love and good':less meet.

XV.

Brothers, through all life's shade and sunshine fleeting, Where'er your paths may lie, God speed your on ward steps! Brothers, my greeting In Beta Theta Pi 1

And may the eternal sunshine find us banding As we have done ta-night, Crowned with "the peace which passeth understanding"

Upon God's Hills of Light!

James Lindsay Gordon.

GEORGE HOADL Y, GOVERNOR-ELECT OF OHIO.

Search the catalogue of Beta Theta Pi from beginning to end, and you will find no one to whom the fraternity owes more than to George Hoadly. For forty years he has been one of our most enthusiastic members. Both in theW est and in the East he was one of our pioneers. In r843 he was initiated by Beta chapter at Western Reserve College. In 1844, having graduated at Western Reserve, he entered the law school of Harvard University, and became a member of Eta, our first chapter in the East. Both at Beta and at Eta he was one of our best workers, as is abundantly s hown by the interesting letters found in the archjves of Alpha and several years ago publi shed in this magazine. Nor did his interest in the fraternity end with his days at college. He is to this day as loy a l and as enthusiastic as when he was but seventeen. It is true that the only high office in the fraternity which he has ever held was the presidency of the convention of 1847. Many conventions, however, have owed to him a great part of their success; for, as a member of the Cincinnati alumni chapter, he h as borne a liberal part in the support of the numerous conventions that have been held at the corporate home of the fraternity. In many other ways he has s h own that hi s active intere st in the fraternity has never ished. It must never be forgotten that, when the financial success of this magazine was very problematical, Judge Hoadly vo lunteered to assume the whole risk.

The interest that Judge Hoadly feels in the fraternity is an example of the enthusiasm with :which he works at whatever he undertakes . What interests him at all interests him through and through As student and as lawyer he works with all his· might. In hi s profession he has always been one of the busiest of men. A term as city solicitor, three terms as judge, a term in the constitutional convention of Ohio, twenty years of se rvice as professor in the Cincinnati Law School-this is the record of his offices in the line of his profession. Yet no record can give an adequate conception of the work that he. has done. It is a common saying that since r866, when he resigned his seat upon the bench, he has been the most over-

worked member of the Cincinnati bar. He has been engaged in innumerable suits of vast importance, the most recent one being the celebrated case of the creditors of Archbishop Purcell. Indeed, as a lawyer he has long had a national reputation.

Undoubtedly it is as a politician that Jud ge Hoadly is now best known. Since his election as Governor of Ohio he has been the most prominent figure in American politics. It is very odd, indeed, that he should ever have ga in ed prominence as a politician, for he is a thoroughly independent thinker. He thinks for himself, says what he thinks, and stands by what ·he says. Such a man may, and must, re-. gard a political party as nothing but a means for the attainment of a particular public good; and when that particular end has been accomplished, he may, and often will, find that to accomplish another public end it is proper to enter another party.

Not long ago Judge Hoadly, in answer to inquiries about his life and ancestry, wrote the following letter to the Hon. S. S. Cox, to whom he is distantly related:

CINCINNATI, July 14, 1883.

" MY:DEAR Your kind letter of the 8th came to me in due course of time.

"You ask:me how I happened with Governor Chase. It was -this way : After spending a year at the Cambridge Law School I lived with my half-brother, W. w·. Scarborough, in Zanesville, and studied law with Charles E. Converse (what a noble gentleman and enthusiasticfriend he was_!) whose brother Cam was Scarborough's brother-in-law. Then I came to Cincinnati with Mr. Scarborough when he moved here, in 1846. George H. Bates, a merchant of this city, whose brother, General Joshua H. Bates, married my sister, and whose wife's sister I afterward married, was a client of S. P. Chase, and so he introduced me to Mr. Chase. I was an anti-slavery Democrat, and naturally fell in with Mr. Chase's opinions and trained with him, voting for Van Buren and Adams in 1848, as a barnburner of the Tilden school, and for Franklin Pierce in 1852, until the Kansas-Nebraska law seemed to present to my mind the paramount duty of resisting the extension of slavery, and

went into the Republican party and stayed there- on the bench most of the time-until tl1e colored man got the right to vote by the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. Then I considered th e mission of the Republican party ended, and, indeed, during my period as a Republican I looked upon myself as carrying to a logical and l egiti mate outcome my Democratic principles, which were best stated in the famous Ohio r esolution, drawn by either Thurman or Spaulding, which pledged the D emocratic party of Ohio to us e all constitutional means to mitigate the evils of slavery, and finally to eradicate it. I believe that resolution dates from January 8, 1848, but I am not sure. VaL's (Vallandigham's) new departure would, in my opinion, have been a grand· thing if Val. had lived; but VaL's death killed the movement, and in its form of Greeleyism it was disgusting to me The only difference between you and me was, that you felt the burden of supposed constitutional limitati ons in the control of s lavery in the territories, which did not sPem to me to exist; and th e n as to re co nstruction, we may have differed totally-! don't know. That was a very difficult subject, which, I thi nk, took the right cours e, but which I have never quarreled with any one for differing with me about.

"You ask me about my ancestry. It is of very little significance, and yet you can have it for what it is worth. On my father's side I come from William Hoadly ( usually spelt 'ley,' bnt my ·father dropped the 'e '), the first merchant in Branford, Conn . He was a brother of John Hoadly, who came to the United States as a student of theology with the Rev. Henry Whitefield, tl1e first clergyman of Guilford, Con n. John Hoadly went back to England, b e came chaplain to Ge.p.era l Monk, and then ratted to prelacy. He was the grandfather of Bishop Hoadly, in whom the family democracy came to a head, although he was a courtier, in th e famous Bangorian controversy grow ing out of a sermon preached by the Bishop ·from the text, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' The Bishop bad sons of talent, one of them the dramatist, but th e family died out in the person of the Rev. Robert Hoadly Ashe, his grandson and biographer. In this country the family became fanners. My grandfather was a Captain of Connecticut militia, who took his company out in the Revolution in several campaigns. He was also a land surveyor, and represented the town of North Branford twenty -six different times in the Connecticut Legislature. He was a member of the convention which ratified the Consti-

tution of the United States for Connecticut, and voted against ratification. Here the Hoadly democracy comes to the surface again. He thought judges for life and senators for six years and presidents for four, and the absence of a bill of rights, fatal to the instrument. My father graduated at Yale in 1801 at the head of his class-a class which embraced Chief Justice Peter Hitchcock, of this State, as one of the students. He was tutor from 1803 to 1806, studied law and became a successfulla wyer in New Haven, Conn., where I was born July 31, 1826. Unfortunat ely for my father's happiness and success in life, my grandfather, William W. Woolsey, ci New York City, a retired and successful hardware merchant, came to New Haven to educate his sons (one of whom is Rev. Dr Woolsey, late President of Yale College), became President of the Eagle Bank, of New Haven, and greatly liking my father, induced him, before hi s marriage to my mother, to leave the law and become cashier of the bank. The result was that my father married his eldest daughter, Mary Anne, the widow of Jared Scarborough, of Hartford, Conn., a nd fin a lly became president of the bank himself, after Mr. Woolsey returned to New York Uity. The fall before I was bom the bank failed, and down came with a crash the whole fabric of my father's fortun es. This brought him in 1830 with his lit t le family to Cleveland, Ohio, where I spent my youth, g r ad u at in g at \¥estern Reserve College, Hudson, in 1844. My mother 's mother was Elizabeth Dwight, sister of Dr. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, who was doubly connected with our family, his wife bein g a half-sister of my grandfather, William W. Woolsey. My grandmother was a grandch ild of Jonathan Ed wa rds and own cousin of Aaron Burr As a ll the sins of my own life are being r3 ked up against me, I will bet you sixpence, Cox, that it won't be long before I will be charged with being unworth y because I have blood in my veins from a common a ncestry with that of Aaron Burr. I wonder if you do not know my cousin, General Samuel Willi am Johnson, Representative in the New York Legislat ure, from westchester County, and his brother, Dr \¥ool sey Johns on, of the H ealth Department, of your city. You ought to know ; they are good Democrats, children of a sister of my mother, great grandchildren of William Samuel Johnson, famous in the convention which formed the Uonstitution of the United States. Among my kindr ed of the present generation are and have been a good many bright people. Among the rest my cousins, Theodore

Winthrop, Sarah C. Woolsey (better known by her nom de plume of Susan Coolidge), and her sister, the wife of President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins University. I think we are a pretty bright set, but that I am at the dull ·end of it. Now, Sam, I would not have bored you with all this genealogy, but you asked me for it, and as · you did ask me for it I have given you the dryas-dust detail above.

" Don't you wish with me that we were young again, and that! was in Charley Converse's office under the influence of that bright eye and magnetic enthusiasm, reciting German every other night to old Herr Timme!, who lived upon the hill above Putnam, and you in Brown University, a senior, ready to take my place as soon as I should leave Charley's office? Alas! and alas! for the tender grace of that day.

''With kind regard, your friend, "GEORGE HOADLY.''

This autobiographical letter, overflowing with interesting details, must prove attractive to any.on·e; and especially to a member of Beta Theta Pi, for, besides the facts regarding the writer, it mentions incidentally several names well known in the fraternity. Mr. William Woolsey Scarborough, Judge Hoad1y's half- brother, mentioned near the beginning of the letter, was a member of the Torch and Crown Society of Amherst College, and

his name is now first upon the roll of Beta Iota chapter. In the same chapter are found two of Mr. Scarborough's sonsnephews, of course, of Judge Hoadly. General Joshua Bates, Judge Hoadly's brother-in-law, mentioned a little further along in the letter, is a member of the branch of Alpha which for a little while existed in the law school of the Cincinnati College. Mr. S. S. Cox, the gentleman to whom the letter is addressed, is the uncle -to go alittle further from the letter itself -of two well-known members of Theta, William Van Cox and James Buckingham Cox, brothers, who introduced the colors now worn throughout the fraternity.

Forgive the digression.

When familiar names are found so closely grouped, one can not help turning aside for a moment.

'iVhile the autobiographical letter copied above gives the best possible account of Judge Hoadly ' s life, nothing has yet been said of the part. that is beyond comparison the most interesting-the political campaign that has just now ended. In this place nothing must be said of this contest; for in this magaEine politics must be touched but lightly. Yet what more need be said? It is enough that the most honorable office in Ohio, the native state of the fraternity, has been conferred upon an ideal Beta.

Eugene Wamhaugh.

THE FIRST LATIN RENAISSANCE. · ·

Among the poets of the early centuries there were some who revived not only the form but something of the spirit of the classic verse. This classical revulsion from the all-absorbing domination of ecclesiasticism was marked by many eccentricities. It showed itself in centos from the earlier authors, in acknowledged imitation s , in translations from the Greek, and in works which, while thoroughly original in thought and method, were permeated with a genius ·and lean:Jing almost equal to that of the best times. When we compare these productions, eccentric as they are, with the writings cf the ecclesiastical poets in the same period, we are led to wonder that the latter should have held the precedence through so many centuries. The of Prudentius, J uvencus, Prosper and Arator, throughout the middle ages, quite obscured to the ·medireval stu -

dent the . worthier talents of Boethius and Ausonius, who are now reckoned, with more justice, among the distinguished writers of the Roman empire. But the like error is to be observed in every age concerning men whose genius has led them far from the well-trodden paths of literary success. Boethius neve1' failed of having attentive readers, who, though they could not appreciate his art, found in his verse the expression of feelings which they had become deeply .conscious of in their adversity. The lighter strains of Ausonius were not altogether neglected, though they appear never to have been well understood. It is not to these great names that we should first attend, but to that of one who, anterior to them in point of time, presented a remarkable combination of the ecclesiastical tendencies.

The name of Crelius Sedulius should be

famous to the latest ages as that of the first Irishman who won distinction in Christian letters He was one who united a devout spirit with an unusually refined taste, while the few facts known to us in respect to his life are sufficient to show that he rare qualifications for the practical business of instruction. He belongs probably to the middle of the fifth century Why he left Ireland, or how, are matters of conjecture, for when he emerged from obscurity, he was already a priest and soon afterwards became, if we may trust some of his biographers, a bishop in Spain. This statement must be held doubtful , however, for the settled labors of the episcopacy · could not harmonize well with a roving disposition such as we know his to have been. He traveled extensively in Gaul, Italy, Greec e and Asia Minor, and lived for some time at Achaia. At Rome, subsequently, he taught rhetoric for years, it was in· that city doubtless that most ?f hts poems written. Though all hts poetry was m its purpose religious, it throughout a diligent study of the anctent poets, especially of Virgil, seems even to have attained somethmg of that reputatiOn for magical and prophetic powers which invested his name during the later portion of the middle ages. The stories that are told concerning Virgil 's birth and the events of his life, the habit of consulting the page s of )1is writings as a method of fortune-telling show, that even in. pa ga n times he was lo oked upon as more than a mere human being. To the early Christians some of Virgil's utterance s seemed so like those of the sacred writers that they conceived him also to h ave b_een inspired for the purpose of revealmg the truth darkly and in parables to the heathen world. They forced his lines to tell a story which we can not now allow Maro had any thought of, and assisted in strengthening the growth of the Vlrgilian legend. In the fourth Pt:oba Falconia, a lady of mdustnous learnm g, constructed an elaborate cento from the work of the great poet to illustrate the Mosaic histm·y of the Creation, the Fall, and the destruction of mankind by the Deluge . A work like this or like the " Incarnation o f the Word" by Sedulius could not fail to exert a powerful influence on the people in an era credulous in matters of science and religion.

In his acrostic on the life of Christ and

in the hymn entitled "Collatio Veteris et N ovi Testamenti" Seduliu s has shown a perversity of taste not to be anticipated fr o m the author of the Incarnation.

The divergence between the literary t as tes of Sedulius and his opinions he sought to harmonize by bending cla ssi ci sm to the u ses of piety. Prudentius looked upon this as a n impossible task, and Victorinus, upon becoming a Christian, was ashamed of hi s work as a commentator upon pag an poets, though, according to tradition, he did in the early period of his conversion attempt less successfully than Proba or Sedulius to turn · the verses of Virgil to the use of the new religion. But when the discovery had been made that a new liter a ry path was possible without the rugged lines of ecclesiasticism, it wa; natural that a certain class of men, few or many, should choose the former. It happened that very few of the persons at the time of which we speak, who reckoned literary excellence of more value than reli gio us opinions, rose. to such that their names dts a nned preJudtce. Critics in the past have puzzled over the artificial problem how Ausonius and Claudianus could h ave arisen ·after the complete eclipse of the classical spirit and have even gone as far as' to suppose that a line of obscure and now altogether forgotten pagans had kept alive the flame of true Roman poes y But there is no such problem to be solved. The poems of Ausonius, Claudianus and Boethius were the outcome of a literary revival as truly as were those of Vida, Petrarch and Politian at a more generous epoc h. Their appearance is not ab le of the progress the new civilization, without gi 'v ing up its own purposes, h ad made !l as polished as that of the ctvthzahon wh1ch it had supplanted.

Ausoniu s was the so n of a witty and talented phy sicia n of Bordeaux. It was the elder Auso nius who epitomized the philosophy of human life in the p1 ofound remark, ""Beatum esse non qui habet qu::.e cupit, sed qui no.n cup it qu::.e non

The son is a l so supposed to have stud1ed medicine, and he certainly inherited his father 's wit. Much learning h as been was t e d in the discussion of the question whether the poet was a Christian or a pagan. N ata li s . has gone so far as to include the n ame of Ausonius among tho se of distin g ui shed literary churchmen, a bold thing to do since the poet's works are as

graceless as Byron's. Others, more cautious have endeavored to show that toward the teachings of the church he stood in a neutra l attitude, while still another class has insisted that he was a rank pagan. The most sensible opinion is that of Gyraldus, w h o holds that the poet _was a Christian in form, but far from p10us 111 his manners. Ansonius belonged to that order of mankind more numerous at the present age than during any previous period, which is thoroughly indifrerent to religious agitation. If he was left alone with his favorite studies, he was willing to accept his friends and their beliefs at their own valuation. To this complaisance is to be attributed the rare vestiges of a tendency toward sacred things which Fabricius observed. No author pleasanter to read exists in the Latin language. He delighted in contrast, in plays upon words, in a delicate wit that gave to mere verba l forms the value of thi11gs . It is plain that the management of Latin was with him a matter of culture and the closet rather than of every -day life. He polished his phrases to the likeness of the Greek epigrams, and many of his most finely turned verses are paraphrases of the Greek originals, as for example his version of the Venus Anadyomene of Antipater Sidon ius:

"Emersam pelagi nuper genitalibus undis Cyprin Apellei cerne laboris opus; Ut complexa mann madidos sal is re quore crines Humidulis spumas stringit utraque comis. Jam tibi nos Cypri, Juno inquit et innuua Pallas, Cedimus <'t formre praemia deferimus."

The work of Ausonius is not inferior to his model, though he has made a notable change in the fancy by representing Juno and Pallas as speaking in the very presence of the statue, while Antipater had on ly imagined what they would have said if the work of Apelles had been placed before them. In either case the pleasantry violates the truth of art. It is designed to •represent the image wrought by the sculptor as more beautiful even than Beauty herself, for Ven u s is the ideal of a perfect female form. But this implies that Apelles had an ideal more perfect than perfection itself. Juno and Niinerva were guilty of supererogatory flattery. The refinement of the com pliment destroys the only reason for its being paid. An instance of a 111ere cleve r play upon wo r ds is the "Venus Armata," .also turned from the Greek:

"Armatam vidit Venerem Lacedaemone Pallas. Nunc certeruus, ait, judice vel Paride. Cui Venus! Armatam tu me, temeraria, temnis, Qure, quo te vici tempore, nuda fui."

"You are rash," says Venus, "to despise· me in arms, since I conquered when I was perfectly naked." It _is a clever device of the poet thus to compare the nude queen of beauty who had the victory in a contest for the pnze of loveliness with another figure of herself armed as if for battle. If we could think of Venus playing the soldier we might .easily imagine her turning aside with such a light witticism the contempt of her warlike rival. This truthfulness to the character of a pretty and not too modest woman gives the verse its charm. Another notable instance of this trick of words is the version of a compliment to Praxiteles, which more than one Greek had labored over. In its best Hellenic form it was a mere couplet in which Aphrodite, looking at the Gnidian statue, exclaimed with angry surprise, '" Praxiteles, where have you seen me naked?" but another epigram, attributed to Plato, expanded the trifle into a dialogue of eight verses in which Praxiteles answers the goddess, denying that he had been guilty of such a mortal sin The iron tool had created an image of the fair Paphian, such as her lover Mars desired This hard, affected conceit was adopted by Ausoni us in the lines:

·"Vera Venus Gnidiam quum videt Cyprida, dixit:

Vidisti nudam me, puto, Praxitele. Non vidi, nee fas: sed ferro opus omne polimus. Ferrum Gradivi Martis in arbitrio. Qualeni igitur dorpino scierant placuisse Cytheren, Tolem fecerunt fen·ea crela Deam."

The well-known couplet on the story of Dido is in better taste:

"Infelix Dido, nulli bene nupta marito: Hoc pereunte fngis, hoc fugiente peris."

It has been said that this little address to the ill -fated heroine of Carthage does not so much express the true feeling of a poet as his mere technical skill, and it is to be admitted that Augustine, who wept whenever he read the fourth .I.Eneid, might have gone through a whole volu me of epigrams without a thought of tears. It would have been quite absurd

for Virgil to have introduced a bit of tinsel like this into the be a ten gold of his verse, and the tragedian would deserve to be laughed at who should make Dido interrupt the last act of a drama with the words, "M iserable woman that I a m ; married I cannot be. I flee from the spot where one husband h as peri s hed, only to be left by another to peri s h " But for a sketch which s hould bring the whole romantic st0ry back to the memory without the pitiful details , Ausonius could not have done better, a nd few other poets, either ancient or modern, could have done as well. The compositi o n which displays the real sens ibilitie s of Au son ius, is this quatrain, addressed to hi s wife:

"Uxor vi.vamus quod viximus, et moriamur, Servantes nomen sumpsimus in thalamo; Nee ferat ulla dies ut commutem er in ::evo Quin tibi sim juvenis, tuque puell a mihi;" which Robert Burton Englished thus:

"Dear wife, let's live in love and die to get h er

As hitherto we h ave in all good will: Let no day chang e or alter our affections, But let's be young to one ano t her still."

One of Heine's pretty little pieces desc ribes the mis e ry of youths and m a idens who l ove a t cross-purposes. Between no two of them does afreqion h appen to be mutual. Ausoni us had lon g before expressed this rom a ntic thought, which has been expanded in so many novels, w ith the epigram:

"Hanc vola quae non vult, ill am quae vult ego n olo, Vincere vult animas, non satiare, Venus''

Th ere is a profes s i o nal touch in the ep i g r a m on Alcon that on ly a phy si6a n , or the so n of a physician, could h ave give n , even th o u g h the or igina l th oug ht were taken from the Greek:

"A lcon hesterno signum J avis attigit, ill e Quamvis marmoreus vim patitur medici. E<!ce hodie juss us transferri ex ::ede vetusta Effertur, quam vis sit Deus, atque lapi s." a nd in that other, which run s:

" Langu.enti medice dixit Diodorus haruspex, Ad vitam non plus sex s up er esse dies, s, u medicum dictis satisque potentior Alcon, Falsnm convicit illico haru spi cium. Tractavitque manum victuri, ni titi gisset Illico nam marco sex p er iere dies."

The ir o ny of the s e line s, which are directed against an ignorant quack, becomes

more general and kindly in the exquisite phrase which all doctors of medicine can afford to smile over, "Evasit fati ope, non medici." The marble im age of J ove would yield to the touch of but one practitioner, but human bein gs find no fate more certain than that of submitting to the physici a n sooner or later, and so their reco ve ry under hi s hands may see m also a mere stroke of fortune. This way of putting it was not to Galen's ta s te, who would have it that when a patient i s not cured, it is the ph ys ician 's misfortune, not his fault. A still better example of the poet's skill in the mere matter of verbal expression is his address to Deli a upon the unfortunate contra st between her dress and her manner s:

"Delia nos miramur; et est mirabile, quod tam Dissimiles est is, tuque sororque tua.

Haec hahitu casta, cum non sit casta, videtur: Tu praeter c ul t um nil meretricis babes. Cum casti mor es tibi sint, huic cultus hone stus; Te tamen et cultu s damnat, et actus earn."

Few expressions can be more trite than for one to say in th e pre se nce of a statue that it se em s to h ave all the appea rance of life, but A u so niu s, following the example of th e Greeks, ha s celebrated th e ge niu s of the sculpto r Myron with wonderful clearne ss in a se rie s of epig rams . Think of the bronze figure of a cow d eceiving the neat herd, the milk-maid, even the very calves and the bulls from the pasture, and you can conc e ive the hum or of the se verses, though on ly a perusal o f the L at in will s h ow how these ludicr ous pictures h ave been harmonized wit h th e require men ts of elegant verse.

At the first g lance it seem s strange that Ausonius s h o uld hav e displayed s uch an affec ti on for th e cl ever trifles of Greek l iterature. But it sho uld be remembered that the last v i g orou s movement of exp iring paganism had for it s object the re storatio n of Hellenic eloquence and philosophy. Th e names of Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, J?r onto, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, are closely link ed with this futil e but brilliant efl'ort. Both shores of the Medit e rranean had witne sse d the g low of thi s revival, and sympat hi zed with those men of ge niu s who s tr ove with the relic s of a universal l anguage to utter the sentiments of mankind. The fa s hion of Greek letters r e main ed lon g a fter this impul se h ad l ost it s origi n a l force. Chri stia nity , first taught in a half

barbarous dialect, stimulated the study of Greek, and the Gallic poet, annoyed by what must have seemed to him the barren and lugubrious labors of his · Latin contemporaries, could find the pleasantries that were agreeable to his taste only among those trifles which had once delighted the cultivated and curious Athenians. It was natural that he should seek to reproduce in his own words the wit that gave a zest to his reading. He showed himself equal to the task; but there was a better and more original side to his genius. Like all men of wit, subject to the alternations of a melancholy humor, Ausonius felt the truth which underlies pessimism. Human life, looked upon as completed in this world, is a most · worthless thing which any rational being might well desire to be rid of as easily and speedily as possible. Only to the chil.d, to whom all things have the charm of novelty, who lives in continued and hopeful expectancy of what the future has in store for him, can be called happy. The disappointed hopes, baffled ambitions, and desires without fruition that make up the whole course of mature life, are such as to make the end of the whole business a pleasant thing to contemplate. Those who are the merriest at times, feel in their thoughtful hours even more painfully others this bitter truth, and are ready, even though they may have escaped the extraordinary misfortunes that tried the patience of Job, to echo his lament, "Perish the day when I was born." This is the thought that inspired Ausonius to write his eclogue on human life, in which he has summarized not only his own observations but the whole philosophy of that classical paganism to which he was attached in heart if not by profession.

In Claudian we have a example of the court poet; ready at all times to sing the praises of the great. Limited as he was in choice of subjects, his acknowledged elegance of style serves to cover but not conceal the poverty of his imagination. The contrast between his thoughts and his mode of expression has produced two diametrically opposite critical opinions upon his work. On the one hand, students of literary form have gone so far as to say that as Virgil surpassed Homer, so Claudian surpassed Virgil, and this may be true in an inverted sense The Latins, said this school of critics, · can point to the verses of Claudian and

say that the Greeks no longer must be looked to as superior. While confessing that he was often burdened with an igno. ble theme, they asserted that he made up in the force of genius what he lacked in the value of his material ; as if the choice 'of a bad subject were not in itself proof of a fatal defect of genius. They praised him for his culture, his temperate judgment, his clear diction, his unaffected numbers; for the well-turned . phrases in which art was so artfully concealed, the use of words removed from vulgar acceptation, the skill with which he avoided the necessity of elliptical expressions; for his historical and philosophical learning, and for his power in narrative and description. Thus it will be seen that Claudian has been eulogized as the possessor of all the virtues proper to the poet, save that of vigorous and self-reliant originality. Those who depreciate him have been quick to seize the weak point. There is in this poet, say they, too little variety ; he is, indeed, never small nor trivial, but he is equally far from greatness. The perfection of his verse becomes at last monotonous and tiresome. He lacks invention, and his poems, after a spirited and animated beginning, soon flag, and the reader completes with difficulty what proves to be an irksome task. There is justice in these observations, and it is a remarkable fact that the period when Claudian was universally popular and when he was imitated and centonized by the most distinguished poets- that is, the sixth century - was precisely the period when the study of Virgil was falling into neglec t.

The question as to .the birth-place of this poet has always been an occasion for controversy. The Greek authors who mention him agree with Suidas that he was a native of Alexandria. This opinion is supported by Claudian's poetical phrase in which he calls the Nile his own river. Passidonius, a reputed friend of the poet, insisted that he was a native of Canopus.' Petraoch claimed him as a citizen of Florence, 'while there are not wanting those who assert that he was either a Gaul or Spaniard. The rival claims of Canopus and Florence have been harmonized upon the theory that the father of Claudian was a m erchant who, during one of his voyages, married a wife at Canopus and carried her to Florence, where his son was born. As

to Claudian!s preferences in religion there has been also a great dispute, but certainly not with good reason. The Carmen Paschale, the Laus Christi, the Miracula Christi El> J:wnjpa and the <l> <uv Ao0'XpcO'-rov have long been relegated to the anonymous position which is appropriate to them. It was upon these mainly that Claudian's reputation as a poet of the Church rested. The works that are known to be his difruse such an atmosphere of paganism as to preclude any thought of the author's having been a Christian. His is not indeed the vigorous belief of the ancient poets in whose minds there was no occasion for questioning the ancient Roman cult. It is rather the opinion of a studious antiquarian, fond of the traditions of his race, urgent in enforcing them, hopeless of the future unless these are preserved. When he turns aside froru the labor of celebrating contemporary greatness, it is to relate the Rape of Proserpine, and the Battle of the Giants. One little piece there is, indeed, among the epigrams acknowledged to be genuine, in which appear the names of several of the Apostles, but with such a centext as to show a mere coincidence, or that the names are used much as those of. the evangelists in the English distich:

"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Saddle the cat till I get on."

This is the XXVII epigram addressed to James, the Master of Horse, and it runs thus:

"Per cineres Pauli, per cani !imina Petri, Ne laceres versus, dux Iacobe, meos.

Sic tua, pro clypeo, sustentet pectora Thomas, Et comes ad bellum Bartholomaeus eat; Sic, ope Sanctorum, non barbarus irruat Alpes; Sic tibi det vires sancta Susanna suas;

Sic, qui cumque ferox gelidum tranaverit !strum, Mergatur, voluCJ·es ceu Pharaonis equi; Sic Geticas ultrix feriat rhomphrea catervas, Homanasque tegat prospera Thecla manus; Sic tibi det magnum moriens conviva triumphum, ·

Atque tuam vincant dolia fusa sitim;

Sic nunquam hostili maculetur sanguine dextra; Ne laceres versus, dux Iacobe, meos."

With this bit of pagan irony in mind we shall not hesitate to accept the statement of Augustine that Claudian was a stranger to the Christian name, though

we may hope that the assertion of some writers is true that he was converted late in life. From the earliest times a corrupt versiqn of some lines from the Panegyric on the Third Consulate has been quoted as proof at least of his Christian sympathies. They were said to have been inserted at the request of the devout emperor Theodosius, and were often cited in this form:

"0 Utinam dilecte Deo! cui nulitat rether Et conjurati veniunt ad classica venti."

But the lines should read:

"0 nimium dilecte Deo! cui fund it a b antris .A<:olus armatas hiemes; cui mi'Iitat rether Et conjurati veniunt ad classica venti."

So that if they prove anything it is the perservering paganism of the poet who thrusts the personality of the heathen deity .J.Eolus into a questionable tribute to the God of Theodosius.

The more important works of Claudian deal with events that had but recently occurred, the wars with Gildo and with Alaric, famous consulates, and imperial nuptials; and his stately, often tumid, verse is a picture in words of tJ1e long procession of barbarian nations subject to the power of Rome, of foreign deities subdued by those of the Latin race. A vigorous picture it is, too, full of action and of the greatest human interest. But the readers of his own time must have felt in a less degree what is so obvious to the moderns-namely the unreality of that antique spirit which he invoked. Rome was already a Christian city, though Clandian did appar ently ignore the fact, and the empire over which she ruled was rapidly passing under the cross. The old order of things was passing away forever. This supreme fact coultl never have been learned from these poems .. In reading them one would only see the Rome that • Virgil and Horace knew, enlarged, strengthened, developed, upon the lines forecast in the .I.Eneid, with a world at her · feet; whereas, in truth, had Virgil been set down on the banks of the Tiber in the fourth century, he would have been bewildered by changes not only in the mere exterior of the city, but in the language of the people, _' which he would have found more troublesome; in their modes of thought, guided, as he would have su spected, by a new, unheard-of system of philosophy, and in their manner of life so

far advanced in that luxury the beginnings of which he had antagonized in his own age. This tendency to ignore Christianity and the revolution which it had wrought, so obvious in both Ausonius and Claudian; must be taken as the characteristic of this final effort to restore the power of the early Latin literature. The opposite tendency was to be observed in the works of who was contemporary with Claudian. He labored to divest his verse of all expressions characteristic of the old national religion And so throughout. the world of culture at that period, the two opposing religions created two literatures widely divergent in point of internal merit, external influence, subject matter and method; but save for a few controversial works one would hardly have guessed the existence of either class of writers from the productions of the other. To both classes the divided empire under Arcadius and Honorius must have seemed more prosperous and powerful than it had ever been before; for they could not see the hidden processes of decay that are obvious to us in the light of subsequent history. On the one hand this apparent pro spe rity would be attributed to the influence of Christianity, on the other to the revival of the old Roman spirit as shown not only in the poems of Claudian and the orations of Symmachus but in the studied imitations of the antique customs; for example, the curious procedure at the outset of the war a g ainst Gilda, when, in accordance with the old republican system, formal charges w e re laid before the senate by the emperor and passed upon with due gravity. A more absurd anachronism ·has rarely been perpetrated by the leaders of the nation than this pretentious revival of a deliberative body that had been dead to all its ancient rights and duties for centur ies; but it was not a whit more surprising than the phenomenon presented in the life and writings of a man like Cla udian. Vv e can infer from the changes that had taken place how great the gulf was which his g e nius bridged in the effort to align himself with the classic poets. The painstaking drudgery which he undertook to achieve correctness, must have been ordinary. Nothin g can be compared to it except the work upon some elabora.te modern Latin poems, and these rarely or never deserve a place alongside of those wl;ich he wrote. Even Gray, the most fimshed worker in English literature, with

all his minuteness, suffers in ·comparison with Claudian, for, though a greater genius, the amount of work he accomplished was far less. Doubtle ss it was the necessity for minute care and for the habitual exercise of all the learnin g at his command that gave to hi s productions, except the fe sce nines on the marriage of Honorius and Maria and hi s epigrams, an air of pretentiou s ne ss. He seemed in a declamatory mood even with those pieces that by a strange freak have been c a lled idyls. Take these two line s that open the Idyl of the Torpedo:

"Quis non indomitam din:e Torpedinis artem Audiit, et merito signatas nomine vires?" or the first line of th e Nilus:

"Felix, qui Ph arias proscindit vo mere tenas."

The genuine poem of Claudian on the story of the Phrenix, considered merely in the light o.f a roman tic miraculous tale, is certainly le ss clever and in"teresting than the anonym us elegiac on the same subject which h as lSOmetimes been attributed to him and sometimes t o Lactantius. Many of the le ge ndary allusions in the two poems are identical , but the anonymus poem has more of the touches of nature than its rival. Thi s s pecial excellence i s sPen in spite of very unplea sant defects in the composition. Both p oe ms dwell upon the curiou s problem of a living creature which . is its own parent and its own offsp ring , but while Cl audia n treat s the paradox with classical brevity in these verses:

"Hie neque concepto fetu, n ee semine surgit: Sed pater est prolesque sibi; nulloque creante, Emeritos artus fecunda morte reformat, Et petit altern am tolidem per fun era \itam: the unknown poet expands it with an oriental loquaciousnes s : ·

"Femina vel mas hae c, sen neutrum , seu sit utrumque, Felix, qn re Veneris fcedera nulla colit.

Mors illi Venus es t: sola est in mo rte v.oluptas: Ut possit nasci, appetit ante mori.

Ipsa sibi proles , .suus est pater, et suus h re res; Nutrix ipsa s ui, se mper alumna sibi; Ipsa quidem, sed non eadem, quia et ipsa, nee ipsa est;

JEternam vitam mortis ad epta bono."

The oratorical tern per of Claudian is best suited to the speeches which add variety and dramatic vigor to his historical poems. The prominence given to the

character of Stilicho would have warranted the poet in arranging the nan·atives now separated by a diversity of titles, into one work under the name of that great general and statesman Doubtless if we possessed the fragments which have failed to descend to us either through Claudian's own shortcomings or the carelessness of subsequent copyists and book collectors. we should be able to trace a more definite unity than is now possible to be allowed. It is the power and address of Stilicho that destroys the avarici ous Rufinus, the lustful Moorish swaggerer Gildo, the wily eunuch Eutropius, and defeats the purposes of Alaric, the Goth. It is his foresight that fills the granaries of Italy when the supply of African wheat is cut off. It is his moderation and wisdom that suppresses the growing jealousy between the rival courts of Milan and Constantinople, and prevents the mutual contempt of the Greeks and Italians from developing into a civil war. His name is the trust of the Quirites and the terror of their enemies. Claudian may well be acquitted of any charge of fulsomeness in his praise of a character which must have bee'n the universal admiration of all law-abiding people. Nor is Claud ian to be rashly condemned by sentimentalists for dwelling triumphantly upon the horrid circumstances that attended the butchery of Rufinus, nor for his persistence in holding up the neuter Eutropius to the contempt of the world. vVith the exception of Alaric, the • succession of foreign and domestic tyrants who infested ' the empire was of a sort as obnoxious to decency as it was devoid of courage. It is possible that the name of Stilicho would have been less remarkable in an age when probity and bravery were the rule and not the ex;ception. Claudian's ideal of his hero is well shown in the passage of the Rufinus when the army on its way to destroy the tyrant at Constantinople is met by the mandate of Arcadius forbidding the invasion of the eastern empire.

To the tumultuous remonstrance of the indignant soldiery, eager for war and unwilling to obey, who cry: "Where Stilicho that is our country," the general replies:

"Desistite, quaeso, Atque avidam differte manum: cadat iste minacis

Invidiae cumulus: non est victoria tanti,

Ut videar vicisse mihi. Vos fida juventus, Ite, mei quondam socii." .

Some of Claudian's best passages are marked by a terseness and epigrammatic point fully equal to that of Pope's best couplets. For example:

"Diis proximus ille est Quem ratio non ira movet."

or : "Suprema pericula semper Dant veniam culpre."

or:

"Divinique volant pro mcenibus ignes; Seu ccelum, seu Roma, tonat."

Or this description of soldiers so eager in pursuit of the enemy that they despised the spoils of the captured camp:

"Invisum miles sitiens haurire cruorem, Per varias vestes, onerataque plaustra metallo, Transit, et argenti cumulos; et credis avarus, Contentas proculcat opes: pretiosior auro Sanguis erat: passim neglecti prodiga lucri."

That he could compress in a few lines a volume of malicious wit is shown in the well-known tetrastich on Theodorus and Hadrian:

"Mallius indulget somno noctesque diesque: Insomnis Pharius sacra, profana rapit. Omnibus hoc, Italre gentes, exposcite votis, Mallius ut vigilet, donniat ut Pharius."

But the poem of Claudian that has proved most to the taste of mankind in all subsequent ages, and which would have been sufficient to perpetuate his fame, was the epigram on the old man of Verona who never had passed beyond the suburb where he was born. It was written early in life, but the courtier poet must have felt throughout his feverish existence a fond regret for that quiet which he so elegantly praises:

"Felix, qui patriis revum transegit in agris, Ipsa domus puerum quem videt, ipsa senem; Qui boculo nitens, in qua reptavit arena, Unius numerat saecu la longa casre.

Ilium non vario traxit Fortuna tumultu; Nee bibit ignotas mobilis hospes aquas.

Non freta mercator tremuit, non classica miles: Non rauci lites pertulit ille fori. ·

Indocilis rerum, vicinre nesclus urbis, Adspectu fruitur liberiore poli.

Frugibusalternisnon consule, computatannum: Auctumnum pomis, ver sibi flore notat..

idem condit ager soles, idemque reducit: Metilurque suo rusticus orbe diem: Ingentem meminit parvo qui germine quercum, ·£quae vnmque videt consenuisse nemus: Proxima cui nigris Verona remotior Indis Bena cumque putat litora Rubra lacum. :::led tamen indomitae vires, firmisqne lacertis .;Etas robustum tertia cern it avum. Erret, et extremas alter scrntetur Iberos. Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae."

These verses appealed strongly to the mind of Cowley, the royalist poet of Charles the Second's time, who, having become familiar with courts of England and of Europe, felt upon the restoration of the Stuarts no ambition above a life of retirement and obscurity in his own country house. He did not find his farm a paradise, nor his moral acquaintances honest and unaffected, yet he introduced his translation of the old man of Verona with the words: "In all cases men must be sure that they do 'mundum ducere,' and not 'mundo nubere.' They must retain the superiority and headship over it. Happy are they who can get out of sight of this deceitful beauty, that they may not be led so much as into temptation; who have not only quitted the metropolis, but. can abstain from ever seeing the next market town of their country." It is the thought of Claudian which he thus expresses in prose and then turns into verse:

"Happy the Man who his whole life doth bound

Within th' enclosure of his little ground; Happy the Man, whom the same humble place (Th' hereditary Cottage of his Race)

From his first rising infancy has known; And by degrees sees gentle bending down, With natural propension to that Earth · Which both preserv'd his Life and gave him Birth.

Him no false distant lights by Fortune set, Could ever into foolish wanderings get. He never dangers either saw or fear'd: The dreadful storms at Sea he never heard He never heard the shrill alarms of War, Or the worse noises of the Lawyer's Bar. No change of Consuls marks to him the year, The change of Seasons is his Calendar.

The Cold and Heat, the Winter and Summer shows,

Autumn by Fruitl:l and Spring by Flow'rs he · kn'ows.

He measures Time by Landmarks, and has found .

For the whole day the Dial of his ground. A neigl!boring Wood born with himself he sees, And loves his old contemporary Trees; only heard o(near Verona's Name, And knows it like the Indies but by Fame: Does with a like concernment notice take Of the Red Sea and of Benacus Lake. Thus Health and Strength he to a third age enjoys, And sees a long posterity of boys. About the spacious World let others Roam, The Voyage Life is longest made at home.

The poem of Dracontius in praise of Theodosius, junior, in its purpose rather than its form, is a copy of the examples furnished by Claudian. But Magnus Felix Ennodius, the bishop of Ticino, who flourished in the last part of the fifth century and died in szr, placed himself, by the style of his poetical writings, in the ranks of the classicists as distinguished from the church writers, with whom one would have expected to find him. He wrote a book of odes and one hundred and fifty-one epigrams. As a specimen of his writing take this extract from the ode to Olybrius: ·

"Fama refert, veterum quae nescit perdere gesta, Quae loquitur semper quicquid in orbe fuit.

. Germina dum lucis Titan dispergit in axem, Et ditat mundum nobi\ibus radiis .

Uda vaporiferas cohibent dum lora quadrigas, Et nitidum gurges mittit ubique diem.

Undantes doctis manibus sol flexit habenas, Artificem dominum lux bene nota tulit.

Sed Phaetontaeo postquam dare regna precatu • Non exploratis viribus instituit

Degenerem primis rectorem motibus astrum Sensit, et excus.Sis cunere crepit equis.

Tunc totam sonipes lucem de naribus efilans Non tenuit legis tempora certa suae.

In flammam cessit splendor, quod luminat, ussit, Quodque animat terras, exitium peperit."

Between the literary ·•reactionists, like Claudian and Ausonius on the one hand and the ecclesiastics. on the other, stands the figure of one whose misfortunes would have made him famous even if he had not shown in the deepest adversity a genius hardly surpassed either in ancient or modern times. purity of language, true Christian devotion and resignation, deep philosophical knowledge, aii.d practical insight into human character, were harmonized in the writings of Boethius . Throughout the middle ages the best minds sought chiefly two books

after the Bible . One of these WiJS Augustine's City of God, the other was the Consolation of Boethiu s, and these volumes, in one form or another, must continue to interest mankind until there is an end of all reading. Augustine's book was attractive from the wide range of its author's learning and observation, that of Boethius presented to all who had suffered the picture of a great soul victorious over injustice The need was a common one, in medi reva l for some example of noble endurance under the wrongs of ·tyranny, of a high contemplative spirit amid the dark horrors of the prison, of calm fortitude in the presence of a cruel death. The history of Theodoric's counsellor furnished such an example, for he had been a patriot in preference to a courtier ; in opposing the king's tyranny over the Romans he had lost his liberty, but even in his cell, separated from his wife whom h e tenderly loved, and from the comforts of wealth to which he had been accustomed, he could meditate with wisdom not only upon the wrongs he suffered, but upon the errors he had himself committed The Consolation was written partly in prose and partly in verse. The prose consists of a dialogue between the Soul of Boethius and Philosophy, who has co.me to teach him . The odes, or metres, are the songs wi!h which that dialogue is · interspersed. When it is rem e mbered' that Boethius was not on ly a philosopher but a skillful musician, who had written a treatise on his favorite art, we can easily imagine how he used his Consolation to relieve the monotony and silence of his cell. The plan of the work could not well have been more artistic, for it afforded all the variety that was po ss ible to a work of. contempl atio n. Most men , even of a literary turn, would h ave thought out a treatise, contrived a romance, or composed a poem. But this book comprise s some advantages of all these form s of writing in addition to the merit of originality The convers at ional style relieves the tedium o f a philosophical disquisition, and enables the writer to produce a measurable contra st between the two persona ges who carry on the discussion. The changes from . prose to verse, and from one subject to another, give to the work some of the v ivacity and movement of a narrative, and this effect is heightened by some of the illus -

.,

trations drawn from histor y or le ge nd, such as the stories of Orph eus, of Circe and Ulysses, of Nero and Seneca and Papinian. Doubtles s· Boethius ·read it often to himself, and, perhaps, sang the metres to music which he had himself com posed.

To a student of English literature an important fact in connection with the work of Boethius is that it was so pleasing to King Alfred the Great as to induce him to make a translation of it into AngloSaxon. It i s not easy .to agree with those would persuade us that this very free paraphrase, much of which is original with the tran slater, is a n improvement upon the book of the unfortunate Roman. Alfred 's version is of the highest value, becau se it enables tiS to s tud y him, but the literary form which is attractive in his work is due to the trained intellect and the practiced hand of the scholar whom he copied. In his hands 'the Consolation took on the form and color of or. thodox Christianity which could not well have been recognized by the author. Boethius was born abo\lt the time of the capture of Rome by Alaric, and his life covered a period of church hi story embittered by the Arian controversy. So univer sa l was the intere st taken in this conflict over the words by which various groups of theologians wished to define the nature of Christ , that, as one historian sarcas tically remarked, "ev ery corner and nook of Con sta ntinople is full of men who discuss incomprehen sib le subjects; the streets, the markets, th e people who sell old clothes , those who sit at the tables of the money changer s, th ose wlw deal in provisions. Ask a man h ow many oboli it comes t o, he gives you a spe cimen of dogmatizing on generated and ungenerated being Inquire the price of bread, you a re answered, 'T he Father is g reater than the Son a nd the Son s ubordinat e to the Father.' Ask if the bath is read y, and yo u are answered, 'T he Son of God was cre ated from nothing.' The learned and the ignor a nt, the courtier and the rustic , the high -born dame, the unsexed attendants of the imperial bedchamber, the polished citizen and the illiterate Goth, were entangled in this abstruse s peculation upon the most difficult problem o f Chrisiian faith." A thoughtful and cultured civilian like Boethius, annoyed by such a disgraceful and blasphemous hubbub as this which r esou nded

throu ghout the empire for the better part of a century, would look _aJ:'out for one s upreme unquestwnable rehgwus truth by which he might hold fast until the tempest of words without knowledge had blown over. But he found only one article in the creeds that was not disputed, and that was the existence of God, the Creator and Pre serve r of all things. Reduced to a simple theisn1, he apparently resolved to ignore all other forms of belief. If he had been a pagan, even of the mildest sort, the intellectual pride that was the invariable accompaniment ' of polytheism would have led him to an exhibition of his opinions . If he had been a professed he would have no reason for silence at a court which would have been in harmony w ith hini, while, if he had been a Catholic, the fact would certainly have come to light in his adversity, for his imprisonment coincided in point of time with Theodoric's persecution of the orthodox party. His book evinces a thor o u gh -going belief in a personal God, while some expressions that he uses indicate his adherence to th e Platonic cosmogony and the Pythogorean theory of numbers. The s ixth metrum of Book Third exemplifies the opinions of the author; "The whole race of men is of one origin ; all things being the work of a single Creator and Father, who alone preserves all. He gives to Ph ceb us and to the moon her horns. He placed men upon the earth and set the stars in the sky . Souls brought down from on hi o- h h e clothed with bodies and so made all mortals noble." Here Boethius has expressed a thought which the most critical of theologians might accept, though he has added to it the antique philosophical notion of the pre-existence of human souls. H e expresses more concretely the thought of that writer whose works are included under the name of Tri smegist us, who had said : "Sou l, then, is an eternal, intelligent essence, having an understanding after its own mode. The soul is essence having finality in itself. Every sou l is immortal and moveable, generated from a certain essence, not of matter, being a thing incorporeal. But nature having ·received the beloved completely embraced it and they mingled; and through this beyo.nd all living upon earth, the man is tworold, mortal indeed, because of the body, immortal because of the essential man." A more perfect ex-

of Boethius' religious belief is found in the ninth metrum of the same book:

"0, qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas, Terrarum coelique sa tor, qui tempus ab revo Ire stabilisque manens das cuncta moveri;

Quem non externre pepulerunt fingere causre. Materire fluitantis opus, verum insita summi Forma boni, livore carens: Tu cuncta superno Ducis ab exemplo pulchrum pulcerrirnus ipse. Mundum mente gerens, similique in imagine forman a,

Perfectasque jubens perfectum absolvere partes:

Tu muneris elementa ligas, ut frigora flammis, Arida conveniant liquidis, ne purior ignis

Evolet, aut mersas deducant pondera terras.

Tu triplicis mediam naturre cuncta rnoventem Connectens animam per consona membra resolvis ,

Qure cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes.

In 'semet red itura meat, mentemque profundum Circuit, et simili convertit imagine coelum.

Tu causis paribus animas, vitasque minores

Provehis, et livibus sublimes curribus aptans

In ccelum terramque ser is, quas lege benigna

Ad te conversas reduci facis igne reverti.

Da pater augustam menti conscendere sedem.

Da fontem lustrare boni . Da lu ce reperta

In te conspicuus animi defigere visus.

Disjice terrenae nebulas, et pondera, mol is, Atque tuo splendore mica. Tu namque serenurn.

Tu reqnies tranqnilla piis. Te cernere finis, Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminn<•. idem."

This is a hymn to the Deity which has been thus translated: "0 Thou, who governest the world with continual reason ! Author of the earth and heaven! who commandest time to move from eternity, and, stable and enduring thyself, givest all things to be moved ! vVhom external causes have not irnpelled to form the work of flowing matter, but the innate form of the supreme good, void of all envy. Thou leadest all things by thy superior example . Fairest of all thyself! Thou bearest the fair world in thy mind, forming it in a resembling image and commanding the perfect to have perfect parts. Thou bindest the elements by numbers that cold may s uit with flame and the dry with the liquid, le st the pure;fire should fly or their weight le ad the earth to be submerged. Thou, connecting the middle soul that moves all ·

things of threefold nature, resolvest it through consonant numbers. When divided, it assembles motion into two orbs, goes on to return into itself, circles round the profound mind, and turns heaven with a similar impress. Thou with like causes conveyest souls and inferior life, and adapting the sublime beings to lighter chariots, thou sowest them in heaven and in earth, and by a benign law makest them converging, to be brought back to thee like the flame of a torch. Grant my mind, 0 Father ! to ascend to thine august seat. Grant it to survey the source of good ; grant with the attained light to fix th.e visible eyes of its intellect on thee. Cast off the clouds and weight of this terrestrial mass and shine on it in thy splendor ; for thou art serenity ; thou art rest to the pious. To behold thee is our end, 0 origin, supporter, leader, path and termination ." The phrase," flowing matter," ( materia fluitans ) suggests the "moist nature unspeakabl' disturbed" of which Hermes Trismegistus speaks, whi:le the "innate form" is Hermes' "Archetypical form existent before the indefinite beginning." So Plato had said, "All that is generated must of necessity be generated by some cause. When the Creator, ever looking to what concerns this world, having used for this purpose a certain pattern, worked out the idea and power of it thus of necessity to finish all things as beautiful. The eternal, ineffable Father of all, had in view an eternal archetype, or pattern. To imagine the archetype created would be blasphemy, seeing that the world is the noblest of creatures and God is the best of causes."

As to the binding of the elements by numbers ( numeris elementa Iigas) Plato, in another place, had said, following the Pythagorean system: "When God put forth his hand to order the universe, Fire and Water and Earth and Air having been produced, He fashioned them according to forms and numbers, to put them together as far as was possible, as should be most beautiful and best." It would be more than difficult to work out an indisputable solution for the problem involved in the phrase" Triplicis mediam animam naturre," but while the more obvious reference of the entire sentence is to the ancient theory of the apparent motion of the fixed stars and planets, it is possible that a deeper meaning was in-

tended to be conveyed, namely, an obscure allusion to the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to the Second Person. Thus Hermes had written "But the Creator Mind along with the Word, that encompassing the circles, and makino them revolve with force, turns about own creations, and permitted them to be turned about from the indefinite beginning to an interminable end ; for they begin ever where they end." Without going farther into the discussion of Boethius' religious view:s, we are justified in concluding that he would sympathize with the efforts of a strong party of church teachers in his time to harmonize the doctrines of Christianity with the speculations of Platonism, and that he would have subscribed to the electicism of Constantine, who assured the Nicene fathers that all they needed in the way of a creed was an acknowledgment of Divine Providence, leaving individuals to their own private opinion in all else. The portions of Boethius' prayer that were unclouded by his philosophy are suitable to an age of the highest Christian culture, as is shown in the beautiful paraphrase of Dr. Johnson : ·

"0, Thou, whose power o'er moving worlds presides; Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides; On darkling man in pure effulgence shine, And cheer the clouded mind with light divine. 'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast With silent confidence and holy rest: From thee, great God! we spring ; to thee we tend; Path, motive, guide, original and end."

One thought there is, expanded in varied forms and with widely different purposes by some of the poets whom we have been studying, which in a special manner links each to the rest and to Virgil, is that suggested to them by the fourth eclogue of the Augustan poet. In that remarkable production the future of the Roman empire had been anticipated, and all the fancies and supersitions regarding a golden age had been used to picture the happy state to which mankind would arrive under the dominion of the Cresars. The minds of both Christians and Pagans were strongly affected by the obscure, enigmatic utterances of a poet who was probably read with more awe and reverence in the fourth and fifth centuries than at any other period of his-

t ory. Among the almost innumerable influence s to which men's views o f life were then s ubj ected - i nflu e nc es of the m ost eccentric ch a racter-the su blim ated theo ries of P lat o's di s ciples, Egyptian l1ierophantism, Oriental l egends, d istorted by the Gnostics and the fo ll owers of Mani; the Hebrew prophecies, t h e SibylJincs, th e p se ud o -Or p h :c poe m s; the mysticism of Apo ll onius of T ya na, Apuleius and the s uppo sitions Herm es; amo n g all the se pro bab ly n o work, ei th er long or s hort , exercised a g re a t er power than Virgil's Pollio . One demonstration of this power lies in t h e work of th e centonists, of which Seduliu s furni s h es a satisfa ctory example. Sedulius and h is c o llab orato rs were convi nc ed that the writings of Virgil-whether consciously to him se lf or not-w ere permeated with th e s pirit of Chri stiani ty, a nd that what h e foresaw was to be the r esult of the t ri umph of the new r e li gion. Therefore h ey endeavored to recast hi s work and o combine the inspired phrases into p oe ms where only the prophetic e leme nt in Virg il s hould appear. Far d ifferent was the ca se with Claudian. He was satisfied with the progress th e Rom a n world had made und e r th e emperors . The religion of the unkno wn God must s oo n dis a pp ea r. It had already begun to wane. The dissen sions among its a dhe re nts were published to all the world. R o man gentlemen on their country estates pre se rved a nd dis se minated the ancient national cult who se temples had be e n turned to another u se in the city. It was onl y a question of t i me when the gods of antiquity would be a ga in uni versally acknowledged and worshipped. · Only by attributing to him such th o u g hts as these can we account for th e ma g nificent lin es th a t clo se the paneg y r ic on the fir s t con s ulate of Stilicho ; f o r it was not the courtier only who spoke in these

ve r ses, but the devout heath e n poet. The golden age which Virgi l had foreseen, Fate a llowe d St ilich o to rea l ize. Under hi s benign authority even the flowers were more beautifu l and the very stars r ecorded his triumph.

In Verclier's Pantheon Antiquorum a picture is given to i llu strate the words of C laudia n , rude enough, but serviceable f or the purp ose The se rpent devouring it s own tail embraces in its folds the hill beneath which the cavern opens. Th e god Apollo approaches the cave from w ith o u t. At the entrance cronches th e mysterious old man, who numbers the s t a r s and fi xes their co u rses and li shes the la ws by which a ll things exist. Within the cavern are seen the years, like lit tle children, ready to go forth in the ir turn. Th e old man, representing both eternity and fate, gazes fixedly to ward th e heavens, pointing upwards with a gest ur e of command. He it is wh o commaftds the golde n yea rs to att end the c o nsulate of Stilicho, to renew th e v irtue and h a ppine ss of the first ages and the pristine fertility of the earth ; temp ers the seaso n s to the continued mildn ess of sp rin g, and restrains those s igns o f the zodiac that rule the bitter c o ld o f winter and the scorching heat of summer. Surely, Claudian , when he wr o t e th e lin es just quoted, felt that the dream of Virgil was about to be realized; that, in great part, it was already a reality. But a century changed th e s cene' altogether. Men h a d, by the time of Boethiu s, learned the emp tines s of that imperial pow e r in which they trusted. Ind es cribable ruin overwhelmed the delicate s tructures which h ad risen under the fancy of the grea t po e t s. B o ethius only mentions the go lden age to re g ret that it s simplicity and virtue and kindlin ess can never again be renewed upon the earth.

J· S. T unis on

HEINE.

A strange white swan, who in a wearied fli ght Sped over lands and seas, and overhung

With maim'd , worn pinions the abodes of light

Whence be was ex ile. And the while be sung

A wild , sad m elody wherein despair

Was ever link'd with wondrous sweetness rare, Whose tender, haunting strains echoed his wrong; A death-song lasting as the stricken life was long.

Cl1a m be1·s Ba z'rd, yr.

HARVARD. I.

'Tis the last week in September, and confusion reigns supreme The peaceful quiet of a Cambridge SUlnmer has passed away in a night, and the morning brings such a commotion as only the return of the Harvard student can produce. A thousand trunks are being banged about by the overworked expressmen, processions of grimy-faced coal-heavers with baskets on shoulder are supplying the student with winter's fue1, countless loads of furniture are flying hither and thither, and a thousand more suc h confusions combine to celebrate the return to winter quarters of that curious animal whose definition and description would exhaust an ordinary dictionary. From the exquisite title "dude," with his "culchawed" manner, to the rough·and-tumble freshman from the country, and from the weary-looking, careworn "grind" to the most skillful "horseman," who never knows where the lesson is except in the translation-all combine to make the family which finds its home at Cambridge.

As in most of the New England colleges, so also in Harvard, the dormitories greatly add to the social life of the students, and while many from choice ornecessity room in private families, the great interest centers around the dormitories. At the north end of the yard facing the open court, which is formed by the arTangement of buildings, stands old Hoiworthy, a plain brick building presenting no special attraction to a stranger, yet famous as having been for years the most popular building at Harvard, and when a more careful observation is made its charms are revealed. Aside from the historic interest which centers around it as having been the old senior hall, the comforts of Holworthy are numerous. Each room, or rather suit of rooms, faces the south, and from the study windows there is a charming view down the long rows Df elms to the further end of the yard where another dormitory bounds the quadrangle. Each suit of rooms in Holworthy comprises a study and two bedTooms, all neatly finished in the style of a century ago, which is becoming again .popular in our own day. Not unlike Hoi-

worthy in appearance and age are Hollu., and Stoughton, twin buildings standing at the northwest end of the yard. Their rooms are a l so of the large, old-fashioned finish. A few of them are furnished, but most of them stand as specimens of the homes of our grand-parents, save only that careful repairs have kept them from becoming unattractive. These three buildings are.i:he oldest of the dormitories. The finest buildings are grouped at the other end of the yard . Matthews and Weld stand on opposite sides of the south end of the yard, and though somewhat different in appeararance may be described together. Both are of brick, with trimmings of stone, and are beautified by the addition of bay windows and other ornaments. The rooms in each are finished in ash, and are either single, having a study and one bedroom, or double, with an additional bedroom. Like all rooms in college, they ar.e provided with open fire-places and neat mantels. Just to the south, and fronting upon the street, is Holyoke, a massive brick building with French roof, containing some of the neatest rooms in college. Though not finished in hard wood, the rooms are fine, and in each suite, besides the study and bedrooms, is included a bathroom. The rooms in this building are especially high and airy, and a neat marble mantel adds t o the beauty of the studies. There are other dormitories less pretentious, but in many respects similar to the those described. Beck Hall, which is owned by private parties but used as a dormitory, contains the finest rooms in Cambridge, the rent usually being four or six hundred dollars for one suite, unfurnished.

Harvard has often been called an expensive place, and not unjustly so, in comparison with other colleges, among the leading items of expense being room-rent. Few rooms rent for less than sixty dollars a year, and in the better class of buildings, like Matthews, Weld, or Holyoke, the average is from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars for the school year. There is every variety displayed in the furnishing of these rooms, from the plain necessities of life to the most elegant and costly furniture. On the whole, the taste displayed is very good, a large pro-

portion of the apartments being expensive in their appointments. One of the finest rooms is insured for five thousand dollars, · and there is one other which is even more expensively fitted up. It is not at all unusual to expend one or two thousand dollars in the furnishing of a room. In the matter of interior ornamentation, some things in Harvard rooms are peculiar. Each club or society in the college has its appropriate "shingle," and the variety of these greatly adds to the originality of some rooms. By far the most common shingle is a certificate printed upon a plain sheet of 'paper the size of note, and upon it a huge red seal. This is neatly in a passe-partout, and used to fill vanous corners of the room In some cases one student has six or eight certificates from different organizations, such as the athletic association, natural history society, etc. Another form quite popular is the medal. In this case a neat silver medal the size of a dollar is engraved with an appropriate design and suspended by ribbons <?f the society colors from the top of a picture frame so as to hang in front of the picture. One of the most peculiar shingles is that used by the Hasty Pudding Society. It consists of a black ribbon about two inches in width, upon which the owner's name is placed in plain white letters. This is tacked above the owner's bedroom door. A similar one is used by the Dickey Club, (D. K. E.), and is also invariably put above a door. The beer-mug shingle consists of a pewter beer'mug, properly engraved with the owner's name and that of the society or club. This usually stands upon the mantel when dry, but is held in the hand when full of beer.

The number of studen ts at Harvard renders it impossible for one to be acquainted with all, and a universal rule of etiquette is to introduce a man entering one's room to all tho se present. This rule is abso lutely necessary, and is so strictly carried out that a man is frequently introduced to friends, and in some cases even to his own chum.

In a community of over a thousand men it is to be expected that much of the social element will be seen; and Harvard, while differing much in her internal life from most New England colleges, has her fondness for social organizations. Few Greekl etter societies have had- the good fortune to live any length of time at Cambridge, and their influences and customs are

scarcely known; but in a series of institutions has sprung mto bemg, which satisfies, to some extent, the want which must be met.

In a previous article it was the writer ' s pleasure to review briefly the class societies. These are possessed of a more or less literary and dramatic character, but a general debating society, known as the Harvard Union, furnishes opportunit y for even the verdant freshman to hear himself talk. Special clubs are very common, and with them many interesting public exercises originate. In the interest of religion two societies have existed for· some time, but while their meetings are open to all who choose to attend, the interest is not so great as to draw large gatherings. In their turn, however, they offer to the public lectures by prominent clergymen, which are well attended. Somewhat in a similar manner the Natural History and Philological societies and the Finance Club, while having meetings in which subjects of interest are discussed by members, offer their greatest attractions in the courses of lectures which are given under their auspices. These, also, are usually interesting and well attended In addition to these there are clubs of aU sorts, whether for social discussions upon special subjects of philosophy and art, or for such social amusements as chess and whist. The chief musical associations are the Glee Club-composed of about twenty voices. and the Pierian Sodality, ·having about 'thirty instruments. These organizations hold two union concerts every year, and also give serenades in the yard during the summer evenings.

In addition to the entertainments provided by the students, there is a series of lectu res and evening readings provided by the faculty. The combined series becomes so complete that almost every evening has its pastime. Readings by the professors of the several departments are given from all the classic authors of the Greek, Latin, French, German, and English languages, and sometimes even others . An interesting series recently given was upon the "Hymns of the Vedas," by the Professor of Hebrew. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the other more prominent authors are repeated annually, while of the less distinguished an occasional reading suffices.

Society in Cambridge is not liberally

patronized by Harvard men. A few assemblies are given each year, but for the most part the student, if he is prominent in society, joins in the festive waltz with his friends from the neighboring cities. This is greatly due to the fact that so many reside in Boston, or its suburbs, and retain their connection with "home" society.

In the neighborhood of a large city there is always a multitude of attractions, prominent among which is the theatre, and among the most constant attendants of the play are many of the students from Cambridge. Concerts also are fi·equent, and the late cars from Boston are well patronized by the pleasure-seeking class.

As to the immoral customs of Harvard, it has been the writer's privilege to see the inside life of most of the New England colleges, and it is said with pleasul"e that, in an intercourse with Harvard men for the past five years, there has been observed less of immorality than in the average smaller college . If the evils of intemperance exist at Harvard - as to a greater or less extent they do exist in all colleges - the average of temperance is far greater than one would suppose.

But each man in Harvard is his own master, and if he lives fast it is of his own choosing; for every man can find good friends of his own stamp in the multitude of students attending the university.

College journalism is represented by three papers. The Advocate, published biweekly, is similar in its make -up to other college literary journals. The Lampoon is a humorous paper, and is iilustrated with cartoon sketches. It has become quite noted for some of its caricatures and witticisms. Tlze Daily Herald is published every morning, and contains the college news, notices from the office, and comments on college matters in general. Tlze Crimson, a paper similar to the Advocate, has just united with the Herald, the consolidated paper being called the Herald- Crimson, leaving the Advocate master of the field in its special line.

Memorial Hall, the finest of the college buildings, was built a few years since at a cost of nearly a half million dollars. The building is divided into three parts-a theatre for commencement and literary ex e rcises, a memorial transcept containing

neat tablets inscribed with the names of Harvard's sons who lost their lives in the late war, and the dining-room,' which is said to be the finest in the world The architecture is Gothic, and the external appearance is not unlike a huge church, with a tower rising over the transept to the height of two hundred feet. The interior of the dining-room is beautiful. The side walls of solid ash, broken up into panel work, rise some twenty feet or more before reaching the windows, and thus afford space for hanging numerous portraits of the early benefactors of the college. Above this on either side is a row of nine double windows, each of which is eventually to be filled with a stained glass portrait of some distinguished author or hero, the figures standing and of life size. Among those already in place are Chaucer,Virgil, Dante, Epaminondas, and others. These windows are chiefly presentations from certain of the classes that have been graduated from the college. From the top of this line of wi)1dows a huge Gothic roof, with its open timber work, rises over the hall. At either end of the room there is a gallery to , which visitors are admitted while the students are dining. The floor of the- hall is covered with heavy ash tables, at each of which twelve students may sit, the whole room having a seating capacity for over seven hundred.

By no means all the students board with the association which occupies Memorial Hall; but as board is furnished at cost, the hall is well patronized.

The order of meals is: Breakfast 8 to 9; lunch 12:30 to 1:30, and dinner 6 to 7· At each dinner the bill of fare includes soup, fish, boiled and roast meats, vegetables, puddings, and fruit . There is used daily 1200 pounds of meat, 400 pounds of poultry, 250 pounds of fish, 3! barrels of flour, 200 gallons of milk, and 8 barrels of potatoes, with "fixings " in proportion The cooking is done in the basement under the dining-room, where not only are there huge ovens where hundreds of pounds of meat can be roasted at a time, but a butcher's shop, a laundry, a bakery, an ice house, and various other departments.

[To be continued.]

H emy W Winkley.

SoME think well of themselves; some are thought well of by others. There are no more remarkable instances of the former class than may be found among college fraternities, of whom none know themselves but to love themselves. Fraternity journals, as a rule, contribute largely to promote this sentiment among their members by sounding their own respective praises throughout the long and happy college year. To awake _to a sense of others around us, and to real1ze that some men are taller than we are, know more politics in five minutes than we do in a week can talk us into admiring silence upon' any branch of literature, can smile more suavely, bow more graciously and win more admiration in a hundred ways than we find ourselves able to do-this is a step, a stride, forward. It arouses us from the lethargy of self-admiration, and leads to the inquiry, what are we good for, anyhow ? That fraternity journalist who discovers something to be admired in other fraternities, and is not afraid to tell it to his readers, is a missionary whose labors deserve to be crowned with success. Who; of that fraternity, could withstand the following from the Phi Delta Theta Scroll?

"It is a well-known fact that the most successful fraternities are those which have the most active interest ·and co-operation of their alumni. To acquire this interest and co-operation the alumnus must be kept informed as to what his fraternity is doing. The Beta 'fheta Pi is acknowleclged by both eastern and western rivals to have, in a gn•ater degree than any other fraternity, this interest of her alumni, and, as a consequence, she stands to-day the leading fraternity in the country. In a great many respects Phi Delta Theta is as strong as Beta Theta Pi, and is stronger in several, but until we can claim as enthusiastic an alumni as she has, we can never hope to be her successful rival.

"The secret of her success in this particular is that she never allows an alumnus to forget that he is a Beta, and that the fraternity takes an interest in him and expects in return that he shall take an interest in the fratemity. Twice a year each chapter sends to every living alumnus, whose address and changes of

residence they are very careful to ascertain, a circular letter containing information concerning everything of interest that has occurred during the year; what progress the chapter bas made and what are its prospects for the future; what the progress the whole fraternity bas made and what are its future prospects ; calls attention to their official organ and solicits subscriptions; tells all about the next convention, how to get there, who will be there, and extends a hearty invitation to attend. In fact , these semi-annual reports are histories of each chapter re-\vritten every six months, and are invaluable for reference. When the alumni see that the active members take such an interest in them, it is only natural that they should return like for like."

THE overwhelming defeat of the Phi Kappi Psi party, in the Ohio election, is another strong rebuke by the honest voters of Ohio to the corrupt use of taffy at the polls, and to other equally flagrant abuses of the elective franchise. ever, since the introduction of fraternity issues into politics, has there been so great a determination on the part of the people to vindicate the great principles of American liberty. Fraternity lines were strictly drawn, and an unusually heavy vote was polled. The initiation of preparatory students entered largely into the contest, and the result has shown how fully the people of Ol).io are in sympathy with the stand taken by Beta Theta Pi upon this all-absorbing interest. It will not do for Phi Kappa Psi to attribute the result of the election entirely to party mismanagement. There was, in spite of rumors to the contrary, an entire harmony within the ranks of both parties, and a full understanding on the part of the people as to the real issues involved. The tariff on wool and the prohibition amendment, while they are claimed by some to have had an influence upon the election, were regarded as of only minor significance when considered in the light of the more important interests that were uppermost in the mindi: of the people. While it is true that the Phi Kappa Psi: party was not sound on the wool question, a careful investigation of the causes of defection in the rural districts shows that it was on

account of a long-e xisting prejudice against the s hape of the Phi Kappa Psi badge, and a distaste for the colors worn by that body, that contributed more than anything else to its overthrow. The system of chapter nomenclature adopted by Phi Kappa Psi, as well as the color of the paper used in their official organ, proved to be obnoxious to the German element, and, as we have frequently predicted, caused a stampede to the side of Beta Theta Pi. A careful analysis of the returns from certain districts shows, moreover, that the defeat was occasioned lar gely by the.failure of the candidate of the Phi Kappa Psi party to receive a majority of the votes cast. Had it been otherwi5e, the result would have been different. As it is, the result is as it turned out to be. That th e Beta Theta Pi party is recognized as the party of reform admits of no doubt. Every candid member of the party will acknowledge this, and as to the opinion of the opposite party, the result of the election s how s that no dependence can be placed upon it.

The lessons to be learned from this election are numerous and startling. Next year the country will be plunged into the excitement of a presidential campaign, and four years l ater another national election will be upon us. The growing frequency of these quadrennial elections is forcing itself upon the attention of the people in an a larming manner. In the palmy days of the republic, before the Phi Kappa Psi party came into existence, no one dreamed that such a state of affairs would ever be upon us; but since the agitation of the postal telegraph system and the passage of the Pendleton reform bill, the country has come to look upon these matters in a new li ght. King Alfonso has been insulted in the streets of Paris, Cincinnati is agitating the introduction of the electric light system in spite of her gas monopoly, M. DeLesseps is pushing the Panama Canal scheme for all it is worth, and Gladstone has refused to let the press reporters ride with him in his yacht. The only just conclusion is that the Phi Kappa Psi party is at the bottom of all this mischief, and as far as they hold the offices of trust under this government, the honest American people are justified in the cry, "Turn the rascals out."

THERE is a deficiency in the means of

acquiring fraternity news and statistics which is lam entab ly felt by fraternity journalists. As a necessary consequence of the secret system the knowledge of the inside facts relating to the affairs of rival fraternities is somewhat shadowy; but much of the misinformation and the consequent mi ss t atements that are constantly appearing in the columns of the Greek press arise from the loose ·statements; and too frequentl y unqualified lies, of chapter correspondents. There is a widely cultivated belief among the chapters of the several fraternities that, in order to maintain their standing, it is necessary to write to their respective magazines that they are head and shoulders above everything in college, not excepting the faculty or the board of trustees. In some instances the chapter letters are but willful libels upon rival chapters, not so full of malignancy now-a-days as they; used to be-the tone of the press will not admit that-but, nevertheless, either full of absolute untruth, or of partisan feeling, or marked by a certain suppression, as our friend Cicero might say, of the real facts; so that while the statements made may be true as far as they go, the statements that might be made of the whole truth would change the c olor of affairs in quite an extraordinary manner.

The editors of the severa l publications are only in a measure responsible for the perversion of facts thus made by their respective and truly respectable magazines. They can at best but expunge frorn communications the scurrilous matter that will be thrown into them from time to time, or correct those statements which from their personal knowledge they know to be un"true; but they are dependent to a hopeless extent upon the correspondents themse lv es, and when they come to consult the columns of their contemporaries and find there the most suave presentation of diametrically opposed statements, a bewilderment ensues which force s them back upon the principles of a speculative faith, whereby the truth of their own chapter letters is made apparent. We are slowly coming to it; but it will take years o f education before chapter correspondents will learn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

THE present advanced system of fraternity journalism offers an important means of education and preparation to college

men who are looking forward to journalistic or literary work. It is well known that the corre s pondents of our daily press are the greatest liars on earth; but it is not intended that our fraternity m agazines are to be made the preparatory schools for this kind of fiction. There is a demand for a class of literary corre spondents, men of cu)tured attainments, whose letters are trustworthy and full of information, and at the same time bright and entertaining and written in an easy, correct and literary style; such, indeed, as need ·not be subjected to the painful revision of the managing editor, but will be, without amendment, neither the despair of the compositor, nor a source of weariness to the faithful reader. A college-fraternity man who has the ability for such a style of correspondence may m a ke for himself, through the columns of th e fraternity press, a name that will carry him to the very front in both fraternity and secular journalism.

So LONG as fraternities have affairs of their own which they prefer to keep within their own peculiar knowledge, it is entirely satisfactory to see contemporary publications blundering in their attempts to present an inside view of affairs to the general fraternity world; and the . deficiency noticeable in the facilities of other fraternities to acquire adequate knowledge of those private matters is one which neither the fraternity press association nor the Pan-Hellenic Conference will be li :cely to attempt' to supply.

We' notice the foliowing p oss ibly humorous references to Beta Theta Pi in one of our exchanges: " Beta Theta Pi is sa id , to have a sub rosa chapter at Easton, Pa If true, its members must be poor men. Will probably make the general convention bi-ennial. At University of Virginia has lo st prestige. Has been refused entrance to Emory Colle ge, Ga., by the faculty, who are satisfied with six fraternities and will permit no others to enter." And thi s: "Vanderbilt University h as ad mitted rp L1 e to an open existence, but cl oses the doors against every other Greek, whereupon the !hi Delta R eporte1· indul ges in an open a 1r concert of praise and thanksgiving, fa i'rly huggin g himself with joy This action of the board of trustees is certa inly an anomalous o ne, and strikes a hard blow at Be 17, whose chapter at Vanderbilt makes great pretensions to excel-

lence, and has recently been claiming the victory over its rivals. Owing to this action <P Ll 8 swept the honors last commencement, ju st as B 8 II was preparing to crow." The same exchange says that Beta Theta Pi "has initiated nobody at Washin gton -Lee this year;" that "Kenyon Greeks are in a very demoralized condition, with the possible exception of L1 K E." On these subjects the understanding we have is entirely different, or, where the facts are not to be disputed, the reasons and proper inferences are, according to the best of our knowledge and belief, other than would be gathered from the fore going extracts. The Sigma Chi might considerately have refrained from an attempt to lacerate our feelings with mention of Washington and Lee Uni ve rsity and of Virginia Military Institute, had it been aware that the charter s of the chapter s of Beta Theta Pi at the se institutions were withdrawn at the Baltimore convention of 188o. Should any reliable inform a tion be wanted upon any other of the subjects mentioned, it can be furnished direct from headquarters.

THE fraternity press is buffeting about the statement that "a negro waiter in Gainesville, Ga., sports a tP ..d 8 badge." We are at a loss to know why this negro should be made the s ubject of so much unkind criticism. It seems like an undue extension of the license c onferred by the late decision of th e Supreme Court upon the civil rights bill to trifle thus with the tender fe e lin gs and character of this dusky and no doubt sensitive "puss'n." Does anyone imagine that because this sable attendant sports a r/J L1 8 badge that he is therefore in any way allied to th a t society? Not for a moment. Then why, may we ask, does the Greek press continue its assault upon our African frie nd?

THE Sigma Chi devotes con siderable space in its October number to the discussion of the way in which the Phi Delta Theta fraternity should be conducted. This will doubtless be as interestin g to Phi Delt a Thet a, as it ha s been to us. In fact we h ave long entertained some ideas our: selves as1 to o th er fr ate rnities shou ld be run, and It I S a pleasure to know that there is a field for instruction up on that subj:c.t. Will _some fraternity in need of a sp1ntual adviser send us its name and address?

THE outcome of the Purdue controversy between the Sigma Chi fraternity and President White is peculiar. It certainly appears to have been a complete victory for the former. The new president, Prof Smar.t, is a member of Sigma Chi, and so is the new principal of the preparatory department, Mr. Craig. The new administration will be carefully followed by the authorities of the state; but, so far as the relations of the faculty and the Sigma Chi are concerned, they are said to be now h a rmonious. The disastrous influences of the fraternit y system Purdue will be awaited with great interest. If an earthquake or a cyclone s hould at any time destroy that great institution, of course, Sigma Chi will be to blame.

"A LATE London fas hion ," writes the correspondent of a barbarian newspaper, "is to adorn correspondence cards with a

likeness of the head of the favorite family dog."

"WHEN Henry Hudson, in 1609, first visited the beautiful bay of New York, and sailed up the river that now bears his name, he was very hospitably entertained by the native Americans, whose customs interested him very much. In a record of this trip the chronic!& says when Hudson went ashore 'the swarthy natives all stood around and sang in their fa shion. Two mats were spread in their wigwams for the visitors, and some food was served in a red wooden bowl, while a hunter was sent to shoot some game for the guest. He came back presently with a brace of pigeons which the hospitable savages supplemented by a fat dog, killed in haste and skinned with shells from the river shore'"Edward Eggleston, in the Century for March.

Betas will appreciate the parts which we italicise, and probably marvel at the repetitions of hi story.

EDITORIAL.

SOME years ago a member of another fraternity undertook to condole with a pro minent Beta in his own college. Said he: "You fellows have an awful lot of dead chapters " - "Yes," was the prompt reply, "and I wish we had more of 'em." That view of the situation has lately become a good deal more popular than it was then. It is n ow no uncommon thing to hear Betas of high standi ng and influenc e express the conviction th a t we need some more dead chapters. Indeed, several have been acquired in the interv a l. Since the Baltimore convention of 188o four Beta chapters have surrendered their charters at the request o f the fraternity. And it is generally conceded that we still have a few colleges on our li s t, in the like o f which the o nly good fraternity chapter, as the plainsmen say of the only good Indi a n, is a dead one

It seems t o us time for the fraternity to take a little more advanced gro und in thi s direction, and to act a little more openly upon the conviction so wide ly entertained. As a matter of fact, in each of the four cases referred to above, where charters have recently been withdrawn, the condition of things was suc h as to have a lm ost no alternat i ve . We did not move until we were fairly driven to do so. It is time

we abandoned that plan of action for a prompter, safer, and more dignified one.

There is no good reason at all why a college, which i s universally a llowed to be far below our standard, and from which no set of petitioners would sta nd the ghost of a chance before any convention, should be permitted to retain a Beta charter, just because it happens to have one already. Why should it be allowed longer to keep what no one would now think of giving it?

Upon the average standing of our colleges in which a fraternity is represented, more than upon all other circum sta nces put together, dep ends the ave ra ge intellige nce and culture of its active membersh ip; and upon tlzat, in turn, far more than upon the brilliant achievements of it s alumni, or the excelle nce of its governmental organization, depends not on ly the act u a l present worth of the fraternity, but a ll its hope for the future as well.

The first business of the fraternity, therefo re, is to see to it that its chapters are located only in the very best colleges, and that they h ave thus-as the y can have in no other way-a reasonable prospect of maintaining a hi g h standard of membership through all th e ir c areer. And we

hold that there is no historical or sentimental consideration, of any kind whatever, so powerful that it ought to be allowed to hinder in the sli ghtest degree the attainment of that object.

There are two types of colleges, each with a representation or two in our directory, with which Beta Theta Pi ought not longer have anything to do. A full statement of the condition of such colleges ought to be prepared and laid before the fraternity, and our chapters therein immediately discontinued.

The first type is the run-down college. It used to be first-class, or nearly so. And our own chapter in it has turned out, perhaps, a long and sp l endid list of the best sort of Beta graduates. But the college h as gone to seed-support withdrawn, endowment used up, small faculty, few students, no future. A few weak fraternity chapters, relics of its golden age, still str uggle along, now and then finding a really good man or two, but nec essari ly made up for the most part of a very ordinary stripe of fellows. There is only one proper thing to do with such a chapter as that-wind up its affairs as briefly a nd painlessly as possible, transfer its names to the general roll, and put after its letter in th e c atalog ue the "prime" mark that stands for obi it. No other course can be justifi ed, either by a consideration for the welfare of the fraternity, or by a re gard for the chapter's own past; for it would be a mistaken charity to. let a career of honor and dignity run dwindling on into a long mediocrity.

. The other type is more difficult to dispose of. It is the second or third-rate colle ge that never was anything better, and never will be, so far any indications point. . Not that it is going to the dogs, either. It has a safe little endowment, and a steady th ough li mited support-s ectarian generally-that will enable it to keep on at its present rate for an indefinite time. But it isn't anywhere near the standard we should now set up for admission to our roll, and by merely standing s till will every year be falling further below that steadily-rising level.. The trouble is, we established our chapters here with our eyes open. The college was no better when we entered it than it is now. But that was a good many years ago . When that charter was issued, the ambition which most Betas

entertained for their fraternity was, that it might be simply the "boss" western fraternity-a good fraternity, of course, and yet not too good to enter a lmo st any western college of fair prospects and with a decent attendance But now, as the French say, we have changed all that. We have in the northern states fourteen strong chapters east of the Alleghenies-five of them in New England. We are far more truly a national fraternity than any other in existence. We are immeasurably stronger, in every respect, than we were ten years ago, and gaining strength every year. And, in the light of an attained present and an assured future vastly more prosperous than we once foresaw, some acts of our not very remote past are seen to be, not the neat strokes of policy they then appeared, but very distinct blunders. The question is, shall we stand by them and try to make the best of them, or shall we frankly acknowledge them as the blunders they are, and set about correcting them, so far as lies in our power? We say, take the latter course, by all means.

"Oh," says Honestus, "let's not go back on our past. That would be too mean . It would be like the snobbery of the young swell who has grown ashamed of his hardworking mother, and is on a par with the conduct of the bonanza king who seeks a divorce from his Irish wife as soon as he has become rich enough to associate with fine ladies . Let's stand by our record. "

But Honestus talks nonsense, as men of his ardent temperament are apt to do, in defense of what appears to them to be a fine or noble sentiment. This is not a question of wives or mothers; and we hold that sentiment has no place whatever in th e present discussion. As we said in the outset, the maintenance of a clear, fine, st r ong chapter-list is absolutely the first business of the fraternity. Whatever stands in the way of that must be got rid of. If we have already done anything inconsistent with that purpose, the Jaw of self-preservation demands that we undo it again, if such action be within our power. The mistake once admitted, any hesitancy about setting it right must be the offspring, not of a sense of honor, but of mere squeamishness.

vVe wish the fraternity, in convent ion assembled, could have laid before it as exhaustive and cold-blooded a statement of

the condition of each of our forty-four colleges as if each were now for the first time applying for a charter from us. After making all due allowance for the occasional, though infrequent, phenomenon of a really first -class chapter in an institution of the second or third grade, and taking into account a ll other extenuating circumstances of whatever kind, there would still remain several- not many, but several-chapters with respect to which we should have, in view of all the facts, but one plain duty, viz : to call in their charters. And the sooner we set out in this path of reform - determined, like Falstaff, to purge and live cleanly hereafterthe better it will be for us all.

ADDITIONAL importance will in the future pertain to the office of corresponding secretary from the fact that the position will hereafter serve as a kind of training-school for chief assistant secretaries; as the general secretary, in the absence of any detailed information as to personal availability, will hereafter designate as his associates men who have most satisfactorily acquitted themselves as corresponding secretaries, and have thus been proved worthy and capable. Other elements will, of course, enter into consideration - rotation, location, and expediency; but, all other things being equal, the compliment is most likely to be conferred upon the best corresponding secretary. With this incentive in view, let each secretary endeavor to do justice to his chapter and to the magazine.

IT IS somewhat remarkable how much a man's enthusiasm for the fraternity is quickened by his attending a convention. We hardly know of an instance in which this result does not follow. To increa s e this happy condition of affairs, we wish to advise most urgently, now while the memory of Saratoga is still vivid in the minds of many, that particular efforts be made by each chapter to participate, with as numerous . a delegation as possible, in the next convention. Cleveland will prove convenient for a very large number of our western chapters, and we see no reason why the outpouring should not equal and surpass our most succes sful past efforts. The nearest chapters should attend in a body, and everyone, whether delegate or not, will be made welcome and will find the experience delightful and valuable.

THE non-appearance of the fraternity poem,either at the convention or in our first number, seems to be chargeable to the mails. The copy did not reach us until the magazine had gone to press, and brother Gordon writes: "I mailed it to brother James E. Heath, of Richmond , at Saratoga, and sent him a telegraphic dispatch to that effect, neither of w hich appears ever to have reached him, the poem being returned to me from the Saratoga post-office."

IN OUR list of miscellaneous contributors we do not intend to con s ider the corresponding secretaries the only repre s entatives of their respective chapters. They have their work of a particular kind to perform , and their field is a limited one. We wish to appeal to the literary abilities of the fraternity in general ; and we invite contributions from all quarters. V•l e know that many of our men are connected with college and national journal is m, and we believe that much literary talent, latent or developed, exists in the fraternity. In order to make a magazine for all we must be assisted by all. We want special articles on light anu interesting Sblbjects, poetry of a high order, open letters discussing fraternity affairs, and , indeed , contributions in any form and on any subject, whether of permanent or merely transitory interest.

IT MAY be proper to add a few words to the discussion in our "Potpourri, " in regard to the duties and character of chapter correspondence. Let each chapter understand what is not yet , we fear, appreciated to its full extent- that the most important of its officers is the corre s ponding secretary. This is not a merely h o norary position, but one that imposes important responsibilities upon its occupant, for it is through him princip a lly that the chapter is known abroad. He is its representative man in the fr a ternity at large, and any careles s ness or incompetency on his part will reflect upon his associates. In our efforts to elevate the standard of our magazine, we wi s h to improve also the tone and literary style of all contributions, especially of our chapter letters, and we th e refore urge the secretaries to use the utmost caution and care in their corre s pondence intended f o r publicati o n. Be accurate in statement, considerate in mention, and polished in style. And, then, write on only one side of the paper.

THE recent establishment of Beta Iota chapter of Beta Theta Pi at Amherst, under the most promising auspices, marks another step in the notable advance that our fraternity has made of late years in the east. The movement into this locality was begun under many discouragements, both from our own members and from the natural difficulty of makipg a foray upon the territory of old -established rivals; but, persevered in with industry and managed with clear judgment, the results have been brilliantly successful, and have secured us a prestige both in the east and in the west that gives us a worthy claim to the name of a great national fraternity. Our chapters are now forty-four in number, generally placed in leading institutions, and coinciding, curiously enough, as one of our correspondents has observed, with the number of the years of our age. The fraternity system is making vast strides in American colleges; and, though often opposed by ignorant prejudice and embarrassed by local customs, its real nature and social value annually receive increased appreciation in those quarters where its influence has as ye t been unimportant. We must steadfastly keep pace with its progress and steadily attain to our ambition of pre-eminence. Numbers alone is not our object. With every recent addition to our ranks our standard has risen to a higher level of worth and culture, and we have now reached a position to insist upon the stridest adherence to high aims and genuineness of quality in our further extension .

IT HAS often been a subject of unfavorable comment that a sufficiently friendly of amity or interest does not always ex1st among the chapters of a district. Sometimes this lack of heartiness almost ?e.generates into h_ostility, especially when 1t 1s thought by a Jealous coterie that some man or chapter is trying to "run things " in that division of Betadom. Such a condition of affairs is always prejudicial to the of the fraternity, and, whenever ex1shng, is mostly attributive to a :want of sociability among the neighbormg chapters. Hence the most effective method of dissipating it is to encourage more frequent intercourse in the different Heartiness and hospitality Will m genera l prove happily fatal to any enmity or indifference, and we would suo-o gest, therefore, that especial efforts be

made to perfect that fraternal sympathy and intimacy which is the bond of our being.

In this respect an admirable example has been set by District I., where the three chapters of Harvard, Brown, and Bo ston University have organized a kind of triple union, under the terms of which there is an annual union dinner given by the chapters in turn ; and thus opportunity is afforded for the cultivation of an intimate personal acquaintanceship. This plan has been in operation for several years, and has proved admirable in its results. It ought to commend itself to those who know a good thing when they see it. What do you think of it?

IN ANOTHER column we present an open letter from an alumnus brother in relation to the letters. The plan that he suggests is interesting and thoughtful, but is, we fear, impracticable. We rriay briefly mention several reasons for this belief. In the first place, it would be very difficult to secure the requisite promptness in the issue of the reports. The secretaries invariably take their time about it, and, for some reason or other, a number are always provokingly behindhand. This delay, which is now simply harassing, would prove fatal to our correspondent's project, and we do not believe that a successful reformation could ever be made. Also, even were the reports got together with any reasonable promptness, it would take time and care to issue the bound volume, and the occasion when they would be of -the most interest would pass before their appearance. This interest is at best a rather transitory one, and the volume would be valuable only as marking a certain stage of our history, which would immediately suffer change; and it would thus prove inefficient as a record of any present condition. Again, what we are inclined to think the most serious objection to the plan, and one treated of by the brother in only an indefinite fashion, is the matter of the expense. We fear the estimate of the cost would immediately discourage any further consideration. Each chapter, in order to observe the rule usual in issuing these reports, must send a copy to each of its alumni ; and this wou l d, in many cases, result in a drain upon its funds too great to be borne. The alumni, too , are chiefly interested in the details of their respective

<?nly, ofwhich they are now kept regularly mformed ; and they can readily gain a sufficient knowledge of the general affairs of the fraternity by reading the magazine.

We, therefore, to sum up, regard the

plan as infeasible, costly and useless; but we invite correction and discussion from anyone who thinks our position untenable.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON NECROLOGY.

To the Forty-fourth Annual Convention of the Fraternity of Beta Theta Pi:

Your standing committee on necrology begs leave to submit the following report: The Betas who have died since the last annual report of a committee on necrology are, so far as reported, the following:

WALTER GoRDON DILWORTH, Sigma, '79

HoN. JOHN ToDD EDGAR, Gamma, '47

HoN. JoHN HANNA, Delta, '50

FREDERIC FRANCIS AIME LIOTARD, Beta Zeta, '85

CHARLES LESLIE McKAY, Alpha Psi and Pi, '81

SAMUEL EDWARD ScoTT, Phi, '82

DAviD HoGE SHERRARD, Zeta, '79

EuGENE GARDNER SMITH, Beta Eta, '79

REv. TIMOTHY WELLS STANLEY, Theta, '52

WALTER GORDON DILWORTH

was one of the founders of the Gamma chapter of Alpha Sigma Chi, afterwards the Sigma of Beta Theta Pi. He graduated from Stevens Institute with the class of '79, and was immediately appointed assistant engineer on the large iron bridge crossing the Missouri at Plattsmouth, Nebraska. After the completion of this work he entered the service of theN orthern Pacific Railroad, where he acquitted himself so well that in the winter of r88I-'8z he was selected to project the line through the Sioux Indian reservation. The following spring he resigned his position, and established himself in Bozeman, Montana, as assaye r , surveyo r, and real estate agent. In the autumn of that year he was taken suddenly ill, and died at the age of twenty-four.

It is said of him while at Stevens that, though a staunch fraternity man, he had not an enemy in college . In the west at the time the Alpha Sigma Chi chapters we r e incorporated into our fraternity, he afterwards returned, and was duly initiated as a Beta. His death at the outset of a career so full of promise was profoundly mourned by all who ever knew him.

HON. JOHN TODD EDGAR, of Gamma, '47, died at Beyroot, Syria, in June, r88z, and should have been entered upon the roll of our dead by last year's committee, but no n otice of his death reached that committee until after its report was published. For many years brother Edgar was in the diplomatic service of his government He was appointed United States consul to St. Thomas, West Indies, by President Lincoln in I86r, and remained at that post until I866. In 1870 he removed to Omaha, where he soon became a prominent citizen. In I877 he was sent to Beyroot, where he occupied the post of consul until his death, or for a period of seven years. A man of unusual accomplishments, hi s services where wellnigh invaluable, and all Americans who traveled in Syria during the time of his consulate will remember with gratitude his many courtesies and attentions.

RON. JOHN HANNA, Delta, '52, died at hi s home in Plainfield, Indiana, on October 24th, r 88z, at the age of fifty-five. ·

The following extract from an obituary notice, published in an Indianapolis paper at the time of his death, will serve to show the esteem in which he was held by those among whom he lived, as well as give the outlines of his career:

"At the age of nineteen, with less than four dollars in his pocket, he arrived , on foot, at Greencastle, having walked all the way from Indianapolis, and entered Indiana Asbury University, in which be obtained employment as janitor. In 1850 be graduated with high honors. He studied law with Judge Eckles, and afterward entered into partnership with him. When Judge Eckles was called to the bench , he formed a partnership with Hon. John A. Masten. In 1858 he removed to Kansas, and served one term in the legislature ' of that territory, acting

as chai rman of the judici ary committee; and introduced and carried through the act abolishing and prohibiting slavery in the territory. After rHsiding there one year he returned to Indiana, and was oue of the electors on the Republican ticket who cast their votes for Lincoln. By President Lincoln be was appointed United States Attorney for Indiana, bnt was removed by Pr es ident Johnson on account of his outspoken cr itic:i sm of his policy. He was elected to the Forty-fifth Congress from the Indianapolis district by a majority of 1,398, and se r ved with marked ab ili ty. He made his home at Greencastle up to about one year ago, when he r emoved his family to a farm near Plainfield. Since his retirement from active political life l\Ir.Hanna has been engaged in the practice of law in this city, being associated with Gen. Fred. Knefler. Mr Hanna's professional career was marked by several important events. When district attorney he gained a wide reputation by his able prosecution of a horde of co unterf eiters a nd viol ato rs of the revenue laws. Afterwards he was engaged in several celebrated criminal cases, defending Mrs. Clem, William Abrams, Warren Tate, and others accused of murder. As a lawyer he was eminently successful, and as a politician he showed those traits of character that go to make up greatness. His private life was as exemplary as his public career was honorable He was a man of strong convictions, great int egr ity, and moral courage. In the exp r ess ions of hi s opinions he was never doubtful nor ambiguous; what he thought he said, regardless of the results to himself. For the feelings of others be showed the greatest co nsid eration, and all his dealings with his fellow-men were upri ght and honorable. He was an earnest, active Republican in politics, energetic in the practice of his profession, and e minently successful in whatever he undertook, and his life from beginning to end is worthy of emu l ation."

The memorial prepared by the Bar Association of Indianapoli s closes as follows:

"John Hanna was a man of warm heart, great attachment for his friends, great enthusiasm for any cause he espoused, generous, and in his life of a citizen, officer, and attorney always manifested the highest integrity. He leaves us an example worthy of imitation, and a character to be remembered with profit. As a father and husband he best showed the real qualities of heart and manhood, and held the place of greatest value."

Mr. Hanna was to fhe last a true and warm-hearted Beta. Brother G. W. Swit-

zer, who lived in the same town, writes: "I visited him freg uently during his sickn ess, and at my last visit, a few days be· fore his death, he said to me that if any Greek came to visit me, I must be sure to bring him to his house."

FREDERIC FRANCIS AIME LIOTARD, born at Geneva, Switzerland,] anuat·y 3oth, 1863, died at Canton, New York, March roth, 1883, aged barely twenty yea rs. He was a member of the class of '85, in St. L awrence University, and had been initiated into the Beta Zeta chapter of our fraternity the November preceding his death. A true-hearted, pure -mind ed brother, and most dear friend, respected and honored by all who knew him, Beta Zeta could h ave begun the roll of her dead by no sadder entry than this.

CHARLES LESLIE McKAY, Pi, '8r, was drowned near Fort Alexander, Alaska, April 19th, r883. He was a memb e r of the United States Signal Service, anci was also engaged in beha lf of the Smithsonian In s titut e in the study of ichthy o logy, mineralogy, and natural hist ory. Young as he was, he had already made a nu mbe r of va luable contributions to science

Brother McKay became a member of Pi chapter in r 879, having been previously initiated at Alpha Psi. He crraduated with honors in r88r. "'

SAMUEL EDWARD SCOTT, Phi, '82, born July 7th, r 86z, died April 13th, r883, at Johnstown, Pa. He was a graduate of the Towne Scientific School of the University of Pennsylvania, a nd at the time of his death was assistant inspector of rails and bridges for the Pennsylvania Railway Company.

DAVID HOGE SHERRARD, Zeta, '79, died at his home in Moorefield West Virginia, in the autumn of last yea/ A honored young graduate, ju st entenng up on the practice of law , a man who "rose high toward the ideal of every trne Greek and Christian," his death was a loss acutely felt by his chapter and by all his acquaintances .

EUGENE GARDNER SMITH, of Eta, '79, is another of the younger alumm whom Beta Theta Pi has this year lost, his being the first name upon Beta

Eta's death-roll. Though engaged in business, he retained all his college-day interest in his fraternity, and his loss will be on that account the more severely felt.

THE REV. TIMOTHY WELLS STANLEY, The ta, '52, died in May, 1883, in the fiftieth year of his age He had held successively many positions of honor and trust in the conference of which he was a member. Was president of the alumni associof the Ohio Wesleyan University, 111 r876, and at one time a trustee of the Ohio Wesleyan Female College. From his initiation into the fraternity his in-

terest in Beta Theta Pi remained active and earnest. At the time of his death he was pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, in Delaware, Ohio, the seat of his mater_ and his fraternity chapter, and hts affection to b o th was frequently manifested. A true and devoted Christian worker, a genial and cultured man his life was one of honor and influence' and death a blow widely felt by many good mtere s t s

Willis 0. R obb, Arthur .1-I. Flack, Yames T Bro w n, Committee

Zeta.

CHAPTER LETTERS.

HAMPDEN SIDNEY, VA., October 8, 1883.

Zeta is in a first-rate condition this year, and never, to my knowledge, has she had such reasons for rejoicing. We began the session with six men, but now number eleven active members. The "converted" five are not only good masticators of the /Jopr, but are good men in every respect. Besides the eleven active members, we have four alumni, who attend our meetings regularly. As an instance of the interest aroused here this session in our fraternity, I will mention this fact : We had been accustomed to meet twice a month, on Saturday nights; but this term not one Saturday night has passed without witnessing an assemblage of loyal Greeks.

Our last chief of the district, W. C. White, is now attending the theological seminary at this place. In the same institution are two Betas of the college, class '83, brothers Palmer and Spurlin. Brother Mosby, '83, is teaching in the Prince Edward Academy near by, and regularly attends the meetings.

We have to lam ent the lo ss of A. D. Drew, Zeta, '84, who has settled in Philadelphia. We greatly miss his pleasant face and genial smile at our chapter meetings. It is rumored here that the Phi Delta Thetas have granted a charter to certain men in Hampden Sidney. The Sigma Chi have but two men in college and three in the seminary They are working hard to keep their chapter alive.

Every Beta here wishes them success, for it is a fraternity for which we have the highest respect.

J· B. Finley, J· D. Eggleston, Cor. Sees.

Epsilon.

CENTRE COLLEGE, }

DANVILLE, KY ., October 10, 1883.

• I notice in the columns of the new BETA THETA Pr that a letter is requested from Epsilon for the November number. We have determined that our brothers shall have no cause to complain of our l ack of enthusiasm this year, as we hear such a complaint has been made in the past. I can assure you that our enthusiasm never was lacking, but we confess to an unpardonable laziness on our part heretofore.

We started in the present year with seven men; we have since increased the number to twelve, by the addition of brothers J. P. Hendricks, '86; Harry '87; C . H. Irvine, '87; ]. W. Guest, '84; and 0. T. Skillman, ' 87. Not for many years have we started in with prospects so bright.

Brother S. D. Roser, we are sorry to say, having been in ill health for some time, has found it necessary to give up his studies, in the hope of regaining his strength. It was with sincere regret that we saw him leave, and we ·hope for his speedy recovery and early return. ·

S. C. Archibald, after an absence of

two years at the University of Wooster, 0., has returned to us this year. He was right welcome.

Our meeting last Saturday was enlivened by the presence of brothers J W. Kennedy, of Louisville, and M. P. Drury, of Cincinnati, a name well known among Betas. We entertained them with an initiation, 0. T. Skillman undergoing the ceremony in brave style.

Brother Alfred C. Douns, formerly chief of this, the Fifth, District, left us last week for Mississippi, where, so rumor has it, he will take to himself a bonny bride. He will then go to Texas, where he intends to make his future home. Brother Lee Dunlap returned to his home in Danville a week or two since, from Kansas City, Mo., where he has been in business for several months.

Our rivals this year are Phi Delta Theta, with nine r.nembers, Sigma Chi, with eight, and Kappa Alpha, a new advent at Centre College, with seven.

But one of our numqer attended the convention this year- IJ. G. Boyle. He .reports a glorious time.

I wish to extend an invitation to all our sister chapters to write to us. We promise them prompt replies. We are so far from other chapters that visiting is almost impossible, and it is only by means of correspondence that we can become acquainted.

S. T .1-Iickman, Cor. Sec.

Alpha Beta.

IowA STATE UNIVERSITY, }

IowA CITY, IowA, October 29, 1883.

Some time has passed since Alpha Beta has made a report of her condition through the general fraternity organ ; and we take this opportunity of informing our br,others that we are in a hannonious and prosperous condition. We received the first number of the new volume of BET A THETA Pr, and feel gratified that our fraternity is represented by so ably an edited magazine.

By the graduation of last year's class we lost four men. Brother Brown is now at Perry, Ia., practicing law, and reports his prospects good. Brother Harwood, who was taking a special course only, did not graduate, but is not with us this year. He holds a position on the Chicago Daily Inter- Ocean, and has already received promotion.

Brothers Baker and Morrison are at

their homes, respectively in Belle Plain and Morning Sun, Ia. Brothers Newman, Montague and Gilbert, '83, are back this year in the law school, which, by the way, has the large st attendance at present it has ever had at this time of year.

During the summer the boys of Alpha Beta organized a camping party, and spent about three weeks hunting and fishing at and about that beautiful sheet of water in northwestern Iowa known as Spirit Lake. At one time there were ten Betas in camp, all of whom were or had been members of Alpha Beta. Brother Johnson , now of Lambda, was also one of the party. That the boys had a fine time can not be doubted. They give glowing reports of hunting expeditions, fishing excursions, and moonlight trips across the lake to attend parties given at the hotel. Before the camp broke up the" Beta boys" were known to all the people about the lake.

Since returning to school this fall brother Dorman, formerly of '85, made it known to the world that in July he took to himself a partner for "weal and woe," in the person of Miss Lucia Cole, a young lady of Iowa City, and one who has ever been a thorough "Beta girl." Though the event was a great surprise to the Betas, they with one accord extended to the happy couple their heartiest congratulations. Brother Dorman has entered the law class, and after next June will engage in the practice of his profes5ion.

Brother Frank Lowden, '85, has a position as superintendent of the schools at Hubbard, Iowa. He will, however, return to his class next year and graduate. We have initiated but one man this year. Do not think by this we are entirely inactive; for, while we appreciate the fact that it is our duty to initiate new men for future work, still we propose thoroughly to know a man and to be satisfied that he is such an one as would make a good Beta before we take him in.

Brother Dey, of '87, now occupies the position of "babe" in the chapter. After trying his true metal we celebrated the occasion with the tJoPr, which is always one of the pleasant features of our initiation services. On this same evening we enjoyed the presence of brother Johnson, who was making his numerous friends a visit, having stopped off on his way to Ann Arbor.

Alpha Beta, we lament, was not represented at the convention this year be-

cause of the distance; still we rejoice in the fact that it was such a marked success, and are heartily glad that the proposition to ho l d the conventions only every two years was not accepted. While the expense connected with these assemblies may be considerable, we believe that it would be a retrograde step not to ho l d the convention annually. I think that it can be safely promised that at the meeting of Betas next year at Cleveland Alpha Beta will have at least one representative, if not more.

We extend best wishes to our sister chapters, and earnestly solicit correspondence.

Rush C. Lake, Cor. Sec.

Theta..

OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, } DEI,AWARE 0., October 18, 1883.

It has been said that chapters should be judged by their letters. This saying, peradventure, has reference to the number of letters written; but, while it may in some cases be true, in othe1's it is not. A l though our letters were few last year, it does not follow that we have been wanting in that zeal and activity which characterize true and loyal Betas and entitle them to the distinction: "Once a Beta, always a Beta;" for we were, and are, filled to overflowing with those essential qualities.

At last commencement we graduated three men-J . R. Hughes, J. T. and C. C. Pickering, loyal sons of W ooglin, and as royal fellows as ever wore the three stars and the sparkling diamond. On Friday succeeding commencement came the gala day, on which was held the" Beta picnic,'' given by the chapter in honor of its graduates, and as an expression of our heartfelt gratitude to our loyal Beta girls and friends for the interest taken by them in not only the local chapter, but also the brothers of other chapters who from time to time called upon us during the year. (Let me say here, that we had the pleasure of entertaining a goodly number of Betas last year, and we want to see no less a number this year.) As Sol came creeping over the hills- bringi11g sadness to the sad and joy to the joyful, kissing away the morning clouds pendi1zg in the sky-he announced to the throng of Betas that the day was at their disposal. There were eighteen couples, among whom were two sons of Beta Alpha-L. M. Snyder and Mart. Mayo; also" Let" Mann,

brother of the only and original Artemus Mann. At 9-30 A.M. a procession of eighteen cars, the best the city could provide, embell ished with the pink and blue, began to wend its way in the direction of the picnic grounds. Beta songs and meriment ·enlivened the road, and 12.30 P. M. witnessed the advent of the picni"C party at the grounds of the White Sulphur Springs. one of the most charming places of resort within the state. The Girls' Ind_ustrial Horne is located here, the parlors of which were thrown open to us, while the superintendent did all in his power for our enjoyment. This was more than Sol could bear; overcome with emot ion, he veiled his eyes under a cloud, and wept bitterly for a time. Then, raising his eyes, he kissed away · the pending clouds, and bruslzed tlze tear drops from tlte mighty oaks and from the spears if the tender grass. At 2 30 P. M. the efficient caterer had the viands spread, and the hungry party set about the demolition of the mighty t1opr, 'Yhich disappeared amid toasts and songs. We will not attempt to follow the pleasure-seekers through all the day. It was a ·day not soon to b,e forgotten, but worthy of repetition from year to year" until the last syllable of recorded time."

We meet every Saturday night in our chapter hall. In answer to the first roll call eight members responded to their names. Two, brothers Baldwin and Mann, failed so to do. While we felt very keenly the loss of these two members, yet with eight zealous workers, immovable in the faith, we knew that we were able to cope with our host of rivals, though with the best of them the rivalry is generous and good - natured. We have increased our number by the accession of G. L. Shannon, of North Lewisburg, Ohio, whom we ushered into the mysteries of the Greek world on September 27.

Phi Gamma Delta, not tardy in recognizing the happy qualities of this "jewel" of '87, attempted to force upori him the fellowship of their chosen band. Natwithstanding the silken cords which they sought to throw about him, their proposals had the peremptory effect of binding him closer to the vantage ground of Beta Theta Pi. As long as fields were unpossessed, or battles unfought, so long the relaxation of our efforts could not be thought pf. The result of our next contest was the capture of Geo. R. Peebles,

'85, of Fayette; Iowa, by whom we are strengthened where we have been the weakest-in the junior class. He also lenothens our roll of successful ball players. S. R. Greer, '86, hailing Oxford, Ohio- the home of our nativtty -beckoned to by the mystic and sugarcoated words of Phi Kappa Psi, gave a willing ear to the voices of Beta Theta Pi, and followed the dictates of his conscience. On October 6th Greer and Peebles first imbibed the principles and cepts of Betaism, an? are now sons of W ooglin, beanng the banner h1gh and shouting to "ye sons of men." At this initiation were present Art. M. Mann, Theta '85; Jacob BriBes, Alpha Lambda, '83; Cl:as. Plenkharp, 0. S. U., T,heta, '85, and Wtlby Hyde, 0 . S. U., Beta, 86, lending a helping hand and inspiration to the solemnity of the occasion. With these accessions our membership is as follows:

J. W. Adair, M L Milligan, T R. Terwilleger, and N. H . Fairbanks, '84; G. P. Thorpe and G. R. Peebles, '85; F P Irvin, M. G. Park, W. B. McArthur and S. R. Greer, '86, and . E. L. Shannon, '87 -total eleven.

Our rivals are: fP iJ 8, tP r iJ, tP K IJI, iJ T iJ, X tP_- and, I'm forced to say, 1: X, whose Alpha chapter scarcely merits the name existence, its position and condition are so precarious. We time aid in restoring it. The condition of our nvals is not much different from that of last year; their numbers range from three to fourteen.

Our university opened this year with an influx of z6o new students. Taken as a whole, it is the finest body of students that has entered here for a number of years.

We are elevated to a new plane of activity, because of the increased size and efficiency of our indispensable magazine . Truly, BETA THETA Pr holds the supremacy in fraternity journalism.

N H. Fairbanks, Cor. Sec.

Kappa.

BROWN UNIVERSITY, } PROVIDENCE, R.I., October 15, 1883.

College opened on the 19th ultimo, and since then, as may be imagined, my time has been busily occupied. The freshmen class is the smallest for years, and presents few features of interest to the ambitious "society" man . However, we utilized

what material there was and obtained two valuable men. Our chief rivals were fortunate in the ties of relationship, obtaining the majority of their men through this fact; strange though it may seem. We had a close contest for a new man in '86, but finally secured him.

On the second Saturday in the year occurs the senior election, the most important political event in the college course. Very little honor is attached to the other class elections or to those of the various associations, but an elevation to a classday position is indeed prized. The most important offices are those of president, orator and chairman of the class-day committee; next comes the addressor of the undergraduates (of a humorous cast), and lastly the two class-tree speakers; the other offices are practically nonentities. There is usually a vast amount of electioneering and no small political genius manifested. There was less of this spirit shown this year than usual, chiefly on account of the numerical weakness of Alpha Delta, the most active in this respect. Brother Cloues, of '84, received the position of orator, probably the highest tribute to ability and popularity in the college course Psi Upsilon obtained the president and Delta Phi the committee chairman, an election not so much disputed on account of the evident weakness of that society.

The chapter was represented at the installation of Beta Iota by your corres. pondent, who had a most enjoyable time, and cannot say too much of Amherst hospitality. The initiation ceremonies, especially, were elaborate and the subsequent banquet elegant. The chapter certainly contains many valuable men, and ought to enjoy a glorious career. The same evening Kappa initiated Geo. H. Crocker and Henry F . Colwell, both of '87, and from Providence, and Geo. W. Willis, of '86, from Pittsburgh, Penn. After the initiation a very appetizing iJoPr was enjoyed, and enthusiastic speeches were delivered by some of our eloquent alumni, and brother Magruder, late of Sigma. The chapter is now stronger than ever before, and fully determined to stand second to none at "old Brown." Kappa was represented at Saratoga by E. P. Allen, '83, E. B. Harvey, '84, and the subscriber, and when they narrated their interesting reminiscences, many were the expres:;;ions of regret heard,

and unequivocally expressed were the various intentions of visiting Cleveland.

Arthur P. Sumner, Cor. Sec.

Delta..

INDIANA AsBURY UNIVERSITY }

GREENCASTLE, INn., October 15, l883.

Perhaps no other year of its history has seen Asbury's halls so full of bustle and stir as now. The · campaign in behalf of the De Pauw endowment fund has been carried on vigorously for the last six months, and has made Asbury known in every nook and corner of the State. So far this year our enrollment is 457 - more than ever before in the history of the college, at this time of the year. We expect to have 6oo students by the end of the year, as against 503 last year.

Asbury's future is still a little nebulous, although fast emerging from the uncertain dimness At the adjourned meeting ?f the board of trustees, held October 4th, 1t found that $59;000 of the $6o,ooo reqmred from Greencastle, and $IJO,ooo of the $r5o,ooo, from the State at large, had been raised, and our chances for Mr De Pauw's "bar'l" were extended until the rst prox. It is confidently expected that the entire amount will be raised by that time, and we shall then be entitled to the first installment ($3oo,ooo) of the endowment. Arrangements are nearly completed for the erection of dormitories and a $ro,ooo observatory, and the increase of our facilities in every department. So Asbury-dear old Asbury, freighted with precious memories - is fast slipping away, merging into young De Pauw, broader, better equipped, bright in the morning sunlight of a glorious future The class of r884 will probably be graduated, not from Asbury College, but from DePauw University.

So far as Delta chapter is concerned, a strong array of facts warrant the assertion that she was never in a more blooming condition than at present . The present catalogue shows that we took one more honor last year than any other fraternity in college. The Kinneve-Monett inter-society prize in debate, considered the highest in college and next to the State oratorical, was won bv brother Will Switzer. Our honors were taken mostlv in belles -lettres and history, and represent work and ability combined. A Delta man was reply orator

from Philo at the valedictory exercises of the literary societies last commencement. We graduated five good men and true. Olcott is now business manager of the Educational Weekry at Indianapolis. Moore is associated with his father in the grain business at the same place. Goodwin is out on the Kansas plains herding cattle, studying law, and working off embryotic statesmanship on the hornyhanded natives. U rmston is in a bank at Kentland, Ind., and Ed. Martin, son of our president, is under the droppings of the Beta sanctuary in the Methodist Book Concern at Cincinnati. They have all started well . All will hold Delta's standard high, and will make "Silver Grays" to whom we, like the Republican party, can "point with pride." ·

A member of the faculty called our chapter this year "an ideal and we are working hard to deserve the encomium. We have had remarkable success in " spiking, " and every other fraternity has vc luntarily admitted that we are the hardest fraternity in college to spike against We have not taken many new men - numbers are not our standard, you know; but all of them are tip-top fellows - brainy, too Wirt. C. Smith and Will Brock (the latter captured after a bitter contest with Ll K E and ri! K Y) first sampled his dogship. Then Arthur Cunningham and Eugene Hector learned the mysteries of W ooglin . At present we have four seniors, five juniors, three sophomores, and three freshmen We expect another junior to return before the end of this term. We shall then have sixteen men-our ideal number, though not so evenly distributed in the classes as we could wish. We are hard at work, and expect to make a record for this year second to no year's work Delta has ever done.

We have the major, adjutant and senior first lieutenant of the college battalion. Two of us are members of the University Q!tartette. Combinations are against us in class and literary societies, and we long in vain for the flesh-pots.

Beta girls ? Ask of the long drives, the shady woods, the beautiful moonlight nights. Ask the other fraternities if our badges are not worthily worn.

We have taken a new departure this year, which, I think, is worthy the attention of our sister chapters. We have elected a corresponding editor, whose

especial duty it is to prepare the chapter letters and news for the monthly. If you do not hear often from old Delta this year, swear at me, not at the chapter.

I inclose our subscription list for the BET A THETA PI. Every man in the chapter but one has subscribed, and several have taken two copies. Can you guess for whom the extra copies are intended? We like the initial number of the new departure. Make them all like that and you will never hear complaint from Delta.

Just as I am about to close, the sad news comes by telegraph that brother Clarence Cumback, son of Governor Cumback, died this morning. It is a sudden and severe blow to us. He was a sophomore, the leader of his class, full of an almost boundless ambition to become a ·great and goo9 man. He was already a prize man , having taken one of the Cloud prizes last commencement. Bright, witty, lovable - shall we miss him? The unbidden tear is the only answer needed. Frank T Lodge, Cor. Editor.

Sigma.

STEVENS lNSTI'l'UTE, } HoBoKEN, N.Y. , October 15, 1883.

I need not repeat what is always said the of the year- that we opened with a fan· quota of earnest workers; that we have excellent prospects of an exceptionally bright future; that we have pledged the m.ost promising freshman; that we are boommg generally. We hope you may take this for granted; but we have some httle news.that should be told now while it is fresh.

In the first place, three of last year's chapter have left us. Frank Magee graduated with '83, and now writes to us from St. Paul, Minn., that he is established in his profession, and has met several whole souled Betas who make him feel nearer home than he really is. F. K. Irwin, an M. E. of the same class is now in Mobile recuperating after his efforts of the past year, and E. _F. Lewi s, '85, who left college, has gone mto the brass business at Waterbury, Conn. He is admirably adapted to his choice of trade s, and we have no doubt that he will make his mark therein.

Among those who remain vVill Dilworth, '85, is a director of the Athletic Association, and takes the mo st promi-

nent part in the college foot-ball team. Oscar Baldwin, '8 5, also represents us on the team and as secretary of the Athletic Association. But there are other accompli s hments than athletics at Steven's, even in the class of '85. Brothers Smith and Norris of that class stand at the head without rivals. Brothers Everhart and Field occupy simi lar positions in the sophomore class, while George Sandt is our star senior.

The latest addition to our chapter is brother H. L. Gaunt, A X, who has just entered our senior class. He was a prize man at Hopkin s, took A. B. in 188o; has been teaching since then, and has now concluded to finish with mechanical engineering. We hope A X will continue to send us such men. Brother Gaunt's advent brings to mind the fact that we now have in our classes graduates from Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Lafayette, the Naval Academy, University of Virginia, and other colleges. During the last few years men h aving degrees from all the prominent colleges in the country have entered our course-most of them the junior year. Among the new rules here we note that no more "special" degrees will be given, and that candidates must take at least the whole senior year with the class. '

We have now about 200 students, about 75 of whom belong to fraternities. This number of fraternity men will probably be increased by 25 freshmen. With six fraternities at work on fifty freshmen you may ima gi ne the fierceness of the campaign We view it with some amusement from a safe outside position. We have a fine local standing, which makes our work comparatively easy.

The ill feeling between the fraternities here has somewhat subsided, and they are gradually getting on speaking terms; but the "bone of contention" is not entirely destroyed. The Bolt will again be published by the same management as l as t year, and will very likely prove as successful as before, if not more so.

On Wednesday, October 10th, the seniors of the chapter took tea and spent a very pleasant evening at the house of Dr Leeds, the professor of chemistry. Mrs. Leeds is very partial to the Betas and we are vain enough to think we serve it.

We have just had a short visit from brother Shively, of Cornell, who returned

by way of New York from Amherst. We regretted that we were unable to send a representative to Beta Iota's initiation, but the distance was too great for any of our boys to attend. We are very much pleased with the new form of the magazine and hope it will have the support it deserves. Finally, let all the corresponding secretaries answer our letters.

Richard Lee Fearn, Cor. Sec.

Beta Zeta.

ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY, l UANTON, N. Y. , October 25, 1883. r

The ou.tlook for Beta Zeta is every encou.ragmg. By the graduation of the class of '83 we lost five active members· but those of the class who are still in town often meet with us, and have lost none of their interest and devotion.

The b?ys who. went to Saratoga reWith glowmg accounts of the conventiOn, and a large proportion of our declare .they will go to Clev:eland next year, If m any way it is possible.

The class which entered this fall is an exceptional one, both in numbers and quality, and several of its members had been under the watchful eyes of Beta Zeta's mei?- for the past year. We have secured SIX men, thouO'h they were "rushed" by our rivals."' This is a large number to take from one class but we feel fully justified by the character of the men. We now number fifteen active members, all zealous, enthusiastic workers.

On the 13th inst. we rejoiced over the new Greeks with the slaughter of a mighty Llopr. There are several fratres in urbe (two of them members of the faculty) who always assist us when we carve a canine, and we regret that we are not so near some of our sister chapters that brothers from them could be with us on these enjoyable occa sions. One of our spreads, last June, was made especially pleasant by the presence of brother W ambaugh, on his visit to the eastern chapters.

Our chapter rooms are in the corner of the main college building, on the third floor; also, on the same floor are the rooms occupied by the ladie's of the Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter and a local ladies' society; and on the' second

floor are the rooms of our rival, the Alpha Tau Omega chapter. As the chapters .all on Saturday evening, you can nnagme that the building is a lively place on that evening.

.Beta Zeta's. meetings.are always favored With nearly, 1f not qmte, the full membership of the chapter, and we trust that all our brothers can understand what enjoyment we find there. There is but one disturbing influence. When the sound of the Kappa Kappa Gamma call AE xoupa' ' AfJTJviJc:; , announces that" The Kappas are going," the condition of business inside makes little difference with us· the windows are thrown up, and o[ haps those who were at Saratoga Will r.emem ber the cry) rings out, anto the town, and to the country for miles around, that "The Betas are at it." . But with this exchange of civilities the mtercourse ends, for by the strict law of the "Daughters of Minerva," they must depart to ther homes unescorted, and the only temptation that could ever cause a Beta to desert his post is thus removed.

Our University comprises two departments, theological and collegiate. Beta Zeta's members are taken exclusively from the collegiate department. This department is open to both sexes. It comprises two courses : a classical course similar to the classical course of colleges, and a scientific course which differs from the classical in the la;1guages ?tudied, and modern languages bemg substituted for Latin and Greek. The number of students in this college is steadily increasing, and, as the institution is yet comparatively young, we know no reason why it should not continue to grow. We congratulate ourselves that we an excellent faculty, that our alumm are zealous and devoted to their alma mater, and that we have as active and enthusiastic a body of students as can be found in any similar institution. ·

I am taking more space than belongs to me, but before I close I must say a word about the new magazine. The October number is eminently satisfactory to all. I see no reason why it should not be the best publication of its kind, and have the largest subscription list. I feel confident that Beta Zeta's subscription list will always be a full one.

Arth zw E. Forbes, Cor. Sec.

Nu.

UNION CoLLEGE, } ScHENECTADY, N Y , October 13, 1883.

Our number this year is ten, including brothers Radliff and Gulick, of '87, initiated this term. We lost by graduation brothers Adams and Van Ness. Both carried off honors, each being appointed to places on the commencement stage, brother Adams taking the first oratorical prize, and also the second Allen essay prize.

Brother Van Vronken, '85, has left us to enter Cornel l. He carries wit h him the best wishes of N u for his success and prosperity among the brothers of Beta Delta .

A goodly delegation attended the conven t ion, and enjoyed to their full the social and physical good things there provided. The enthusiasm which prevailed there filled them, and when we came to-

gether it diffused itself through the whole chapter, and as one result our chapter hall has been improved in many respects, making it among the best at Union. We can say without egotism that our prospects for the coming year are good; and the presence of our district chief, brother Hall, in our midst guarantees hard work that they may be realized.

Brothers Hall and Robinson attended the initiation of the Amherst chapter, and came back well assured of its strength and prospective success. Forty-four years -forty -four chapters. A semi-centennial celebrated by half a hundred chaptersmay it be so!

Brothers Doolittle and Van Kirk, of Beta Theta, have called · on us this term, and we hope to see more ere long. ·Any Beta who will favor us with a visit shall receive a hearty welcome.

W H. Robinson, Cor. Sec.

T he Circular Letters.

OPEN LETTERS

WoRSHAM, VA., October 13, 1883.

EDITORS BETA THETA PI :- The October issue of o u r welcome paper has just been received and its entire contents devom ed. I like its present shape very much, and trust you will receive the hearty ·support that you desire and that s u ch an ably-edited paper deserves.

I have been thinking over the chapter letters for a few days since and this thought came into my mind : We have now forty-four chapters in our fraternity and it is the duty of each chapter to send out a circu lar letter to our alumni and sister chapters twice a year. Now would it not be a good plan to have some' united action between all the chapters? Let each chapter send its letter to some one appointed to attend to· the matter and have these reports all printed together and bound up in a neat volume. This would secure a letter from each chapter and would certainly present a much more complete statement to our alumni than a few lines from one chapter . I think it be well for each chapter to have Its letter bound first in those copies for Its own use, and let the other letters

follow, either in alphabetical order or as the catalogue has them ; or, first the chapter letter, then the other letters of that district, and the rest following. There might also be a tabular statement inserted at the back of the book of what each chapter is doing.

Most of the chapters have their chapter (already used in the catalogue), and If they chose could have them in this volume without incurring extra expense

The letters might follow each other as all have suggested and the names put in after them as a kind of catalo<Tue thus • b g1vmg every man in our fraternity the names of members initiated each year. Such a publication would, I think, take the place of both letters, and should be issued some time about May Ist.

Regarding the matter of expense, it seems to me this volume could be got up at small cost. There are forty-four chapters, and of course each chapter would order as many copies as it has alumni; that would make about 5000 copies to be issued, which could certainly be done at a very small cost per copy. (Each chapter would keep a copy itself, making nearly fifty, and would not need to send a copy

to the other chapters.) Probabl:Y a good many advertisements could be inserted in the back of the book, which would cover a good part of the expense. Some of our chapters now issue a book of this character, I think, for their own use, in which they also put the chapters of other fraternities at their own colleges . Such a book as I have suggested would certainly present a pleasing a ppearance and reflect

credit upon the fraternity. Let some one who is conversant with the cost of such things take up this subject. Doubtless. the editors of our BET A THETA PI would t a ke the job at low figures. (Hardly.) I should like to see a discussion of this matter from the chapters and alumni.

Yours in xat --, W C. W, Zeta, ' 8o.

THE FRATERNITY WORLD.

THE anti-fraternity rules at Vanderbilt have been formally repealed.

KAPPA ALPHA (South) has placed Theta chapter at South Carolina Military Institute.

SIGMA ALP A EPSILON has a sub-rosa chapter a t Davidson College, North Carolina, it is rumored.

ALPHA TAU OMEGA has a chapter at Lehigh which is confined chiefly to the preparatory school.

PHI DELTa THETA will soon swing out with eight or ten men at the University of Pennsylvan ia .

DELTA PHI has a crowd of petitioners from Lehigh, and the Phi Kappa Sigma are trying hard to revive their chapter there

PHI GAMMA DELT A does not seem to have had a very successful convention. The chapter at the University of California is in a pr ecar iou s position.

DELTA TAu DELTA, at Iowa State Univer sity, has fitted up new rooms which are large and spacious. Th ey were occupied for the first time about. October I st.

Ciii PHI h as been running unnamed chapters for so m e tim e at Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and Stevens In stitu te. The two latt er are about to come out from under the r ose.

DELT A UPSILON has revived her chapter at Williams , so l ong defunct, and purpose s to establish chapters at Tufts, Denison and the Universities of Iowa and Kan sas in the near future .

IowA STATE UNIVERSITY has seven fraternities: Delta Tau Delta, Phi Delta Theta, Sigma Chi , Kappa Kappa Gamma, I. C., P. E 0., and Beta Theta Pi. All are reported as flourishing.

PHI DE:LTA THETA reports new chapters at the Univer s ity of Texas and at Ohio State College. The c hapters at Trinity University, Texas , and RandolphM a con College, V a., are dead.

SouTHERN Kappa Alpha has transfered its chapter at the new South Carolina Univer sity to the South Carolina Military Institute , and have also placed a chapter at the University of Texas.

Th e Scroll (Phi Delta Theta) claims th at the recent establishment of their new chapter at the University of Texa s now gives that fraternity forty-four active chapters- which just equals the Beta Theta Pi in numb er .

SIGMA C1-n , in its October issue, becomes hi ghly excited over the practice of " lifting ," which it stro n g ly c ondemns, and very justly, too. The l atest in s tanc e th a t gave rise to th e pre s ent o utbur st recently occurred at Delaware, where the Chi Phis " lifted " a Sigma m a n with very little ceremony.

THE Phi Ga mma Delt a for October contains an installment of three full pages, double column s, of the convention poem, "Ego et Alter," w ritten in blank verse, and promises a continuation We fear some of the feet in this compo s ition were measured with a very stiff yard-stick, but as yet haven't been ab le to read very far.

MAURICE THOMPSON, the "merrie bowman" of Indiana, whose recently-issued book of poems, "Songs of Fair vVe at her," has be e n very favorably received by the public and cities, is a Phi Gamma Delta.

THE chapter of the Alpha Beta Tau at the Univer s ity of Mississippi is in a flourishing condition. Four young lad ies have been initiated this seaso n. A more charming and desirable "gai" c o uld not be had.

THE current number of the Sigma Chi is well printed, but is modelled too much after the D. K E. It attempt s estimates of its rivals and gives a rehash of floating goss ip concerning them. It makes the amusing statement that Beta Theta Pi ha s been refu se d admission to Emery College by the faculty on account of the large number of fraternities now there. We rather think the shoe was on the other foot, and

Emery College was refused admission to Beta Theta Pi. Vi/ e have declined better colleges than this. By the way, where is it?

"YESTERDAY was the second anniversary of the founding of Minnesota Alpha chapter of the Phi Delta Th e ta fraternity at the University. So the members of the chapter and their lady friends, the Delta Gammas, du ly celebrated the advent at May's parlors in the even ing. About 30 were present. The guests began to arrive about 8:30. Refreshments were served at 9:30 P. M. A "welcome" was given by the president, Mr. D. R. Davidson, J. E. Crews, Indiana Zeta, "Our Fraternity" and J as. Gray to "Our Guests, The Ladies." Miss Annie H. Jefferson to the" Phi Delta Theta Boys," and a member of Wisconsin Alpha responded to "Our Sister Chapter." The remaind e r of the evening was spent in a social way."-.Minnesota Tribune, October 13th.

THE BETAS.

CuMMINGS, of Gamma, has entered Princeton.

C. R. THURSTON, Kappa, '82, is m the lVews office, Newport, R.I.

W. R. PoMERENE has returned to his studies in the State University.

SoLON LouER, of Beta, has left Adelbert, and is now located at Willoughby, Ohio.

]. N. SANBORN, Alpha Pi, '8I, is working up the Kansas City alumni. A good move.

STANLEY ARCHIBALD, of Epsilon, and later of Alpha Lambda, has returned to Centre College.

BoYD, Alpha Lambda, '85, is a junior at Princeton. There must be eight or ten Betas there now.

JACOB BRILLES, Alpha Lambda, '83, will soon enter upon the study of law at Wht;eling, W. Va.

JOHN W. AnAMS, Nu, '83, is at his home in Belmont, Iowa. He will enter a medical college next fall.

A. P. FoLWELL, Kappa, '85, is secretary of the Brown University Boating Association.

C. W. DELAMATYR, of Beta Kappa, has entert>d the senior class of the Ohio State University.

En. S. ABBOTT, Beta Eta, '84, is studying medicine at the Hahnemann Medical College, Chicago.

A A. STASEL, Alpha Lambda, ts studying law at Newark, Ohio, with C. H. Kibler & Son.

W. R. P ATTENGALL, Beta Eta, '84, is studying law in the office of A. McNichol, Esq., of Calais, Me.

DENVER ]. MACKEY, Theta, '8<;, 0. S. U., has entered the law department of the University of Michig a n.

THETA's babes are three in numberGeorge R. Peebles, '85; S. R. Greer, '86; and E. L. Shannon, '87.

HoN. H.J. BooTH, Alpha Eta, '7.), made · a good treasurer of the Democratic State Central Committee, if the result of the election was any index.

A. P. CooK, Beta , '82, is principal of the Milford high schools .

]. S. GADBERRY, Beta Beta, '85, is now reading law under a prominent lawyer at Brookhaven, Miss.

W. B . of Iota , is working on an engineer corps in Georgia, a nd lik es the country very much. ·

JoHN B. WILSON, Beta Eta, '8 I, h as gone to Eureka, Kansas, where he will cbntinue the study of medicine.

W. A. MoRROW, Theta, '86, is in business at Cleveland, Ohio. He intends t o visit the boys a t Delaware soo n

HENRY A. DELANO, Alpha Eta, '99, spent hi s summer vacation in Granville, where he preached several times.

W. S. TAYLOR, Beta Alpha, '84, is studying law at Springfield, Ohio. He will graduat e from Kenyon in June.

HE NRY P. MANNING, Kappa, '83, Phi Beta Kappa, is instructor of mathematics in Cook Academy at Havana , N.Y.

GARR ETT ELLISON, Alpha Eta, '85, is working in the Kan sas City office of the Canada Southern Fast Freight Line .

]. M. STEEN, Beta Beta, '83, was elected professor by the tru stees of the U niversity of Mississippi last commencement.

WARREN E. RussELL, Beta Alpha, '85, has left Kenyon, and enrolled his name among the s tudents of Amherst College.

E. C. RANDOLPH, Theta, '8 5, is now located in Chicago, Ill., and contemplates calling on the Delaware boys at an early date.

BROTHER SJiEPPARD is not in college thi s year, but engaged in the delectable business of school-teaching at Hanover, Ohio.

HE NRY D. H ERVEY, Alpha Eta, '87, will spend the winter at Georgiana, Ala. , where he will be engaged in the lumber business. ·

H . E/ MosELY, L a mbda, '8 3, has been assisting in his brother's store at Grand Rap id s, Mich., this summer, but at present - i-s at Battle Creek, Mich., acting as general agent for F. B. Dickinson & Co., book publisher s of Detroit .

C. E. McLENEGAN , Chi, '82, is one of the heacl teachers in Milnor Hall at Kenyon College , and has joined Beta Alpha.

L. W. TAYLOR, Beta Eta, '83, is principal of the Abbott Square Grammar School, Bangor, M e . He h as ten assistants.

0. N. KILLOUGH, Beta Beta, '85, who was compelled to leave college la st year on account of ill h eal th , is again with his chapter.

]. V. CILLEY, Beta Eta, '83, is first assistant engine e r on the railroad in process of construction from Moron to Pereyra, Argentine Republic.

D.]. SNYDER, Theta, '68 , is still principal of the Reynoldsbur g Academy. He sent several well -train e d students to his alma mater this fall.

WILBY HYD E, of Beta Kappa, has followed President Scott from Athens to the State Univer sity. There is a goodly number of Greeks at Columbus.

WM. T. HAINER, Beta Eta, . ' 76, of Waterville, Me., was elected a member of the board of trustees of the Maine State College la s t June by the alumni.

F. R. BABCOCK, '8s, is in business with his father at Manistee. He expects to finish at Harvard. Lambda looses in him one of her mo s t enthusiastic members.

JusTICE WM. B. WooDs, of Beta chapter, spent part of hi s vacation in visiting the sce nes of his early life arou nd Newark, Ohio He s pent some time in Granville.

Two of our well-known Cincinnati alumni, S G Williams a nd Eugene W ambaugh, have ju s t formed a law partnership, with offices located at 64 W. Third street.

DuRBIN WARD, of Alpha, ought to be the ne x t United States Senator from Ohio. It is very gratifing to Beta Theta Pi to se e her sons urged for the hi g h places of the nation

THE marria ge of ]. C Harris, Beta Beta, '8z, and Miss Mary Thurmond , both of Asbury, Miss , occurred Oct obe r 16 th, 1883. It was, indeed, a delightful afrair. Beta Beta wishes the newly-wedded couple the most unalloy ed happines s.

H R. CocKE, Beta Beta, '85, was unable to return to college this session on account of having to look after his large farming interests in the lo'vver part of Mississippi.

A. W. HooKER, Alpha Kappa, has recently entered the University 'Of Mississippi. He at once entered Beta Beta's fold with the enthusiasm of a true and experienced Beta.

. E. V. BorE, '85; G. C. Cox, '86; G . S . Cox, '87; K. B. Conger, '87; H. N. Hill, '87; H. C. Ferris, '87; C H Benedict, '87; and R. M. Gear, '87, are the names of Beta Alpha's babes.

JoHN CAssrus MARCELLUS CLAY WEEDMAN, Theta, '85, is in Chicago, where, with C. R. Brodix, h e publishes American Politics His address is room 42, Lakeside Building.

ARTHUR P. BROCKWAY, of Alpha Eta, has been lo s t to his chapter for a number of years. Can anyone send his address to lock box 690, Granville, Ohio? He u sed to li ve at Adrian, Mich.

IN THE account of the forty-fourth convention, which was published in the Bruno nian, mention was made of "Willis 0. Robb, LL.D., of Cincinnati." Doctor Robb is in good health!

HoN. DANIEL W. VooRHEES, Delta, '49, lectured before the Students' Lecture Association, at Ann Arbor, October 26t h. Lambd a expected to entertain him by "swinging" three or four "barbs."

REv. I. F. KING, Theta, '58, formerly presiding elder of London District (Ohio) Conference, is now pastor of St. Paul's M E. Church, at Delaware, Ohio. The Theta boys g ladly welcome hip1 back.

CoL. A. T. BRINSMODE, Beta, '6o, was elected president of the Twins burgh, Ohio, alumni association at its l ast meeting. Philo A. Wilbur, Beta, '66, is the poetelect for the next meeting, with W. L. Campbell, Beta, '67, as alternate.

LAMBDA seldom appears in print without recording the marriag e of one of her boys . The happy youth this time is F. L. York, who was married , September 6th, to Miss Allbright, at her home, Brighton , Mich. Brother York is instructor in the Ann Arbor School of Music.

NOVEMBER I ITH was the sixth anniversary of the death of Governor Oliver P. Morton. His memory lives in the hearts of the people, and his great services in behalf of humanity are precious to every lov er of his race.

HoN. E. M. STANBERRY, of McConnelsville, is ekcted to suceed himself as member of the Ohio House of Representatives. Brother Stanberry was recognized early in his term as one of the ablest men in the legislature.

W. K. L. WARWICK, of Beta Alpha, rejoices in the e lection of his father as lieutenant-governor of Ohio. When the Betas themselves don't take political honors, they put their fathers in. "Palley" will be present af'the Cleveland convention.

DR. GILES S. MITCHELL, Pi, '73, was quietly wedded to Miss Esther DeC amp, of Cincinnati, Monday evening, October 22d. Dr. and Mrs. Mitchell will be "at home" to their friends at their residence, Fourth and John streets, on Thursdays, after November ISth.

GEORG E B MooRE, '83, of Indianapolis, writes us to say that he is just recovering from a tedious illness, and to send u s a year's subscription with his flattering compliments. He reports the boys of Delta in fine shape, to say nothing of the g irl s

ART. M. MANN, Theta, '85; JacobBrilles, Alpha Lambda, '83; C. V. Plenkharp, Theta , '85, 0. S. U., and Wilby Hyde, Beta Kappa, now at 0. S. U., were in attendance upon Theta ' s last initiation and sacrifice. The two former came all the way from Wheeling, W.Va

MosES S . CRoss , Rho, '79, who graduated last year from the Garrett Biblical Institute, the theological department of North Western, has been elected to continue at the head of the department of Greek in the institute, of which he has had virtual charge for the past year.

A GRACIOUS acknowledgment of thanks is certainly due an untiring and keenwitted Cincinnati alumnus, Sylvester G. Williams, for the valuable assistance rendered by him in preparing our first issue. His wide experience and facile pen will be greatly missed on our editorial staff.

BROTHER BEAL, Lambda, '82, has been called to mourn the death of his father. The deceased was always a hearty and energetic supporter of Lambda; and, in order to show their appreciation of his services and sympathy and feeling for "J unie," the chapter has drawn up articles of condolence to be presented to him and Mrs. Beal.

WILLIS VAN DEVANTER, of Delta chapter, and Miss Dollie Burhans, of Ionia, were married on October roth, at Ionia, Mich. The occasion of the marriage was a happy one, and many kind friends extended the heartiest congratulations to the young couple so well mated. Miss Burhans is from one of the cultured homes of Michigan, and "Van" is a devoted and prosperous young lawyer. The wedding trip extended to Minneapolis, and afterward to Cincinnati. At present Mr. and Mrs. Van De vanter will live at Marion, Ind., but will probably make their permanent residence elsewhere.

THE following from the J acksonviUe correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, concerning a member of Rho, '78, will explain brother Kinman's friendly relations with the congressman from Illinois, and, indirectly perhaps, some of our success in the recent Illinois Legislature:

The Hon. E. M. Kinman, of this city, and a member of the last legislature, was married this afternoon to Miss Nellie C. Springer, daughter of the Hon. T. M. Springer and niece of congressman William M . Springe r. The affair occurred at the residence of the bride's parents, and was quite a social event

J. S. GooDWIN, Delta, ' 75 , writes us from Beloit, Kansas, where h e is engaged in the practice of law, and sends subscri_Ptions for himself and for W R. Goodwm, Jr., Delta, '83 "Will," he says, "is now manager of Good win Park Stock Farm, owned by W R. Goodwin & Sons (J. S.' Goodwin and W. R. Goodwin , Jr.). The farm is located about one and a half mile s west of Beloit on the Solomon river. We have ju s t fini s h e d a barn containing 5,200 feet of floor room, and have five herds of imported Rolled Angus, Short-horns and Jerseys." "As for myself, " he continues, "I am still plodding away at the law. Have now five large office rooms , a thousand-volume library, and a partner who manages the loan, in s urance and railroad company branches ."

THE following touching memorial of our recently deceased brother, Clarence Cumback, of Delta chapter, Indiana Asbury University, has been received from the corresponding secretary of that chapter:

DELTA CHAPTER, BETA 'l'HETA PI, } GREENCASTLE, IND., October 16, 1883.

Brother Clarence Cum back, son of Hon. Will Cum back, of Delta chapter, died, October 15th, at his home in Greensburg.

He had been a member of this chapter for more than a year, and a brighter, more enthusiastic and more promising Beta, Delta chapter did not possess; and his death is not only deeply felt by his chapter, but also by the whole university.

On the dav of the funeral the college work was almost suspended. A delegation, consisting of three members of the faculty, President Martin, Vice-President Reupath, and Dr. John; six members of his fraternity, brothers Lodge, Igleheart, Switzer, Emery, Masters, Smith, and Campbell, together with a number of other students, attended the funeral. The services were conuucted by Drs. Martin, Redpath and John, and Rev. J. G. Chaffee; and were impressive and beautiful. The coffin was decorated with magnificent floral offerings from his fraternity, class, and friends.

After the services, six of his fraternity brothers bore him tenderly to the grave, where the last solemn rites betokened his initiation into a grander fraternity above

The resolutions adopted by his chapter were as follows:

WHEREAS God in His infinite mercy bas se en fit to from our midst our beloved brother, Clarence Cumback, we, the members of Delta chapter of Beta Theta Pi fraternity, do hereby

R es olve That in the death of brother Cumback we' Jose a true friend, a sincere brother, and a loyal Beta, whose place must be ever unfilled and his lo ss irreparable.

'l'hat we tender our sincere sympathy to the parents and fri e nds of the decea s ed in this their great loss and affliction.

That we wear the bad ge of mourning of . the fraternity for one week, as a tok en of our sorrow.

That a copy of these b e to the family, and be published In the city, college, and fraternity press.

F. '1' Lodge, }

J. G. Campbell, Committee

C. W. B ennett,

Many other honors were paid to our deceased brother, which can not here be mentioned

J. G. Campb ell, Cor Sec.

THE CHAPTERS.

IN ouR October issue we expressed ourselves at some length in regard to chapter letters, and made a formal call upon certain fifteen of the chapters for our next issue . We regret that large proportion of the secretaries so designated have failed to respond with their quota. Indeed, we are seriously that our appeal has not been received with its due attention, and we wish to request most urgently a decided reform in this matter on the part of the delinquents. The fraternity feeling can never be better preserved than by a constant interchange of information and interest, and the magazine serves as the widest disseminator by far of that mutual sympathy which we wish thus to strengthen Let there be no further neglect in this matter of chapter letters, but let every chapter and secretary realize how encouraging it is to the other chapters and how vital to the maintenance of the magazine that these reports should be frequent and comprehensive . We shall therefore still expect returns from those who have disregarded our mention in the previous issue, and for the next issue wish in particular to hear from the following chapters: Upsilon, Beta Delta, Beta Iota, Alpha Chi, Psi, Beta Beta, Alpha Gamma, Beta Alpha, Alpha Eta, Lambda, Iota, Alpha Beta, Alpha Pi, Omega and Alpha Nu. Let no one, however, who is not here called on be dissuaded from carrying out any previous intention of writing. Letters from all sources will be welcomed. To those who were prompted by their interest and fidelity to favor us last time, whether as voluntary or designated contributors, we return sincere and appreciative thanks.

DELTA's new departure should be noted. A corresponding editor is worth trying.

BETA KAPPA at Athens has two men left and no promising material for new members.

BETA BETA has begun the year's work with the greatest enthusiasm. She has initiated ten choice men, from whom she will doubtless reap a goodly number of honors and prizes next commencement.

No NEW men have been initiated at Beta Gamma (Rutgers), and the outlook is rather poor.

KAPPA gives each initiate a copy of the constitution of Beta Theta Pi, and a copy of the chapter by-laws.

PI IS the leader at Bloomington, and has a very fine set of men. For further particulars write to Patton.

THE Ohio chapters are discussing the advisability of a state reunion, which surely ought to be brought to a focus.

BET A THETA has thirteen mem hers, and has the leader in '85, '86 and '87. It has taken four men from Colgate for '87.

ALPHA ETA has been greatly at a loss without a bali, and is now rejoicing over the prospect of a good hall in the near future.

BETA ALPHA has eighteen members and several "barbs" . in ' 88, and she is bound to keep at the head in Kenyon College.

ALPHA LAMBDA has eleven members, and is booming. Eleven seems to strike the Ohio chapter as a good number. See Theta and Alpha Eta above!

KAPPA has two men on the ball nine, Norman Gunderson, '86, pitcher, and Clif. P. Seagrave, '85, center field, with L. Shiel, '86, waiting for a vacancy.

W OOGLIN has two worthy and distinguished sons in the faculty of the University of Mississippi. Beta Beta feels very proud of her brother " profs."

WE ARE requested to correct the statement made in the June number that Sigma was the parent of Alpha Sigma Chi. Beta Gamma was that parent chapter.

THE elections of the class of '84, which were held 4- ecently at Brown University, resulted in the choice of brother Richmond Brewer as vice-president, and brother W. ]. Cloues as class-day orator. Both these gentlemen hold high rank as scholars. The valedictorian of the class, A. D. Cole, is also a Beta.

LAMBDA has one member from" down south," one from the eastern coast, one from the western coast, besides others from points nearer home in the north region.

UPSILON chapter is blest with the friendship of a chapter of Kappas, who are better Betas than members of their own order. Co. education is the thing, according to Upsilon.

THETA chapter has eleven members, each of whom takes the paper, and eight take two copies each. Theta has two members. of the board of directors of the 0. W . U. ball nine, and three players on the nine.

ALPHA ETA has a membership of eleven and has three men pledged in '88. At a recent election of the gymnasium association, the vice-president, secretary and treasurer were elected from the Betas, and on" field-day," June 26th last, twenty Betas entered in fourteen contests, winning ten prizes. Brownell, '86, won five, Robinson, '84, two, Sheppard, '84, one, Castle, '84, one, and Tuttle, '87, one,

BETA IoTA, of Amherst, our newest and one of our best chapters, composed of a former local club known as the " Torch and Crown," was formally established on the evening of October 12th, under the superintendence of the chief assistant secretary for District I., brother W. M. McInnes, of Eta. Twenty-five members of the original society were first initiated, and then the· newly-formed chapter in turn initiated five pledged men, giving the chapter a total membership of thirty. Eight Betas were present from Harvard, two from Union, one from Madison, two from Cornell, two from Boston University, one from Brown, one from Kenyon, and two from North-Western University. The business of the evening ended pleasantly with a banquet at which the attendanee numbered fifty.

TAU CHAPTER, we learn, is in good condition this term. Two accessions have been received from Pi, a senior and a sophomore, and one barb. has been initiated. The chapter now consists of eight members. In the prize exhibition last June, Park Daniels took first prize for declamation in the preparatory department, and J. B. Allen and M. H. Jusley took first and second prizes for the same in the sophomore class We hope that some of our lagging chapters may, too, come up to Tau.

RESOLUTIONS--ETA.

EDITORS BETA THETA Pr: In obedience to my instructions, I forward you the following resolutions:

Resolved, That Eta chapter of Beta Theta Pi extends its heartiest congratulations to the new brothers of Beta Iota, and desires to express its confidence that their auspicious prospects will be fully realized.

That the members of Eta chapter return sincere thanks to Beta Iota for the generous hospitality extended them.

That a copy of these resolutions be entered on the records of Eta chapter; and that a copy be transmitted to Beta Iota, and to the official journal of the fraternity

M. W. Frederick, Cor. Sec

WHEREAS, We have heard with great pleasure of the merited elevation of one of the founders of our chapter .

Resolved, That we, the members of Eta chapter of Beta Theta Pi, extend our hearty congratulations to our brother, the Ron. George Hoadly, of Ohio, upon his election to the chief magistracy of his state; and that we are confident that his administration will be one of wisdom and justice.

Resolved, That the corresponding secretary be instructed to send a copy of these resolutions to brother Hoadly and to the BETA THETA Pr magazine.

M. W. Frederick, Cor. Sec. Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 15, 1883.

THE COLLEGES.

WELLESLEY has 120 freshmen.

HARVARD students have taken up polo.

MR. JoHn Guv VASSAR has presented Vassar College with $2 5,ooo.

DARTMOUTH gets $10,000 from Jason Downer, of the class of 1838.

REv. PHILLIPS BROOKS will conduct morning prayers during November at Harvard.

THE undergraduates at Cornell number 4°7·

EvENING prayers have been abolished at Williams. ·

DARTMOUTH is to have a new chapel to cost $3o,ooo.

THE autumnal hare and hounds races are being run on bicycles at Harvard.

YALE freshmen completely defeated the sophomores in the annual "rush."

THE Amherst sophomores have voted to allow the freshmen to carry canes.

OBERLIN has received a gift of $5o,ooo with which to found a musical observatory.

OHio boys at Yale have formed a state association, similar to others of the kind there.

SANSKRIT is in the optional list at Williams college this year, and one student elects it.

CoLBY UNIVERSITY opens with a boom and is reported as on the high road to prosperity.

AMHERST and Dartmouth are to have daily papers, which exist at Harvard, Yale, and Cornell.

THE annual foot-ball match at Brown University was won by the sophomores in three straight games.

THE Ohio Wesleyan University has . enrolled six hundred and twenty students, three of whom are colored .

CoRNELL is planning a new library building and an observatory, and contemplates the addition of a school of mines to the course.

AT PRINCEToN, '84 won the championship of the college in base ball, without losing a game. The University "battery," Harlan and Moffat, belong to that class.

THE freshman class at Harvard numbers 285; at Yale, I7o; at Brown, 6o; at Amherst, 62; at Cornell, r 52; at Union, so; at Syracuse, roo; at Ohio Wesleyan, 84; at Denison, 20; at Colby, 34; at Vassar, 54; at Wellesley, r2o; at Ohio State University, 55·

MADISON UNIVERSITY has a new professor of Latin and modern languages in the person of Albert G., Harkness, Ph.D., Brown, '79, a son of Albert Harkness, of Latin grammar fame.

THE University of Vermont is to have a new building for its medical department, through the generosity of ]. P Howard, of Burlington, who has given over $4oo,ooo to embellish that city.

THE statue of John Harvard, the first benefactor of the college now named for him, will soon be erected in the Delta at Cambridge, Mass. As no portrait or bust remains of him, the figure will perforce be an ideal one.

WINSLOW UPTON, a graduate of Brown University in r875 , and of the University of Cincinnati in r877, is the newly-elected professor of as tronomy at Brown U niversity, to take the place filled by the late Samuel S. Greene.

A BOY choir of sixteen voices has been introduced in the chapel at Harvard. The new athletic grounds have been laid out on Holmes Field during the s ummer. The grading and laying of the cinder track has been completed.

AoRIEN J ACQ..UINOT, assistant professor of French since x871, died in Cambridge on Friday, September 21st. He was a native of Darnay, France, a man of fine education and talent, and has been a most successful teacher in his department.

THE sophomore and freshman classes of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, N.Y., were suspended November rst. They had a struggle for the class banner, in which the institute property was damaged to the amount of $500. Two students were seriously injured, and others slightly.

PRESIDENT RoBINSON, of Brown, in his annual report , strongly recommends the establishment of a pmfessorship of rhetoric, and urges enlargement of the course of study in that department. The president also favors some action by the association of colleges in New England toward restricting the multiplication of students' societies and athletic sports, which interfere with the main college work, and he substantially endorses the position taken by Dr. McCosh, of Princeton.

THE future of Indiana University is full of promise. The great loss sustained in the destruction of one building may prove a blessing, as new buildings will soon be erected upon the new campus in Dunn's Grove , near Bloomington , and the college will be in better condition than ever.

THE students · of Yale college are divided as follows: I 5I seniors; I43 juniors; 155 sophomores, and I70 freshmen. There are 212 in the scientific school. The crew has abandoned the stroke which proved so unsatisfactory in the race with Harvard, and the men are being coached in the former stroke.

THE higher education continues to make gratifying progress President Carter, of Williams College, is said to be "very anxious that his college should h a ve a good ball nine," while we learn from a recent issue of a Harvard paper that the captain of the foot-ball team of that ancient seat of learning "has laid aside everything in favor of work on the field this fall." Prof. Libbey of Princeton has again offered a medal for · the highest batting average made in the university nine in the coming season.

HARVARD is determined to retain its laurals as premier in athletics during the season of I883-4· Foot-ball, lawn tennis, lacrosse, base-ball, boating, bicycling, and cricket and track athletics have begun with a boom, and the prospect is excellent for even a more successful season than last year. Victorious on the water, in field athletics, bicycling, and lacrosse, with a record to be proud of and with a standard in base ball, cricket and foot-ball in every yvay creditable, it stands ahead of any other college in the country.-Ex.

AMHERST has laid the foundation of a new gymnasium, which will have a running track, private dre s sing and bath rooms, and a billiard hall. The Audubon collection of the birds of America has been pre s ented to the college b y on e of its alumni.

THE following is a list of the degrees of A. B. conferred by New Engl a nd colleges at the commencement of '83 : Harvard , 205; Yale, I r 9; Amherst, 88; Dartmouth, 6r ; Brown, 53; Williams, 43 ; Bowdoin, 36; Colby, 30; Bates, 23; W esleyan, 2I; Trinity, 19; Boston University, (men) I4; Bo s ton University, (women) I2; Tufts , 12; Smith, 49; \Velle sley, 37·

A VERY serious accident occurred at Harvard October 2oth by which a number of students were badly injured, though none fatally. A large crowd of spectators had a s sembled at the boat-house to witness the fall scrub races, and was chiefly gathered on a platform with balcony above, built on piles and projecting over the w a ter. From some defect or decay in the underpinnin g, superind:uced by the unusual weight upon it, the platform gave way, and the balcony fell with it, crashing down upon the struggling victims in the water. Fortunately the tide was low and thus the additional horror of drowning was averted ; but, as it was, s everal men sustained severe injuries, chiefly of broken legs and arms, and cuts on the head. The greatest excitement prevailed for some time, and all thought of the races was given up, the contesting crews hastening to assist in the liberation and rescue of the endangered and injured The college authorities are censured for carelessne ss in allowing the boat - house to remain in so d e fective a condition.

OUR BUSINESS DEPARTMENT .

[This department is in charge of the Business Managers, and will be devoted exclu sively to the business interests of the paper. All notices and announcements of a busines s ch a racte r will be in-se rted in this d e p a rtment only. Addre ss, BUSINESS MANAGERS BETA THETA PI, 137 W. Ninth s tr ee t , Cincinnati, Ohio ]

Sometimes the good of the service is promoted by disobedience of orders. Such an occasion presents itself in the history of this paper. At the Saratoga

convention the yearly subscription price of the magazine was r e commended to be advanced to two dollars ( $2.00) b eg inning with the November numb e r, r883.

The Bu s iness Managers, a pp o inte d by the Board of Directors, have pu s hed the affairs of the magazine with an unusual vigor, and the result is that before the arrival of the date fixed for the a dvance

in the subscription price, they almost saw their way through to the time their successors shall be appointed.

As this magazine was founded solely for the benefit ot the fraternity, and not for the purpose of a revenue, we know the convention recommended this advance simply to assure its financial success, and as this success is already nearly in sight, the Business Managers feel that they are justified in not following the recommendations of the convention. In this decision they have the support of the editors and directors.

Encouraged by the unusually great and substantial aid already given, and believing that those who have not yet re spo nded will do so at an early day, and thus show an appreciation of their efforts to please, the Business Managers, upon whom the burden and responsibility of the magazine's financial affairs are laid, announce to the fraternity their ability to conduct the paper successfully for the year I883-'84 without any advance in the price.

Five hundred new subscribers will make our circulation two thousand. This figure we should and will have, if they continue to .come in as they have during the last two or three weeks. Every facility will be afforded those who will engage in the work of increasing our circulation. The BETA THETA PI should and can have the largest constituency of any fJaternity publication, and the Business Managers will do everything, with the assistance of chapters and individual members, to swell the subscription list to the utmost

We are under many obligations and greatly appreciate the assistance given by many of the chapters and alumni. We desire especially to extend our hearty thanks to Thorpe, of Theta; Shepardson, of Alpha Eta; Leach, of Alpha Nu; Fullerton, of Rho; Jones, of Beta Eta; Stevens, of Alpha Iota; Greenawalt, of Alpha Gamma; Mozier, of Alpha Beta; Good, of Beta Alpha; Charles, of Alpha Delta; Forbes, of Beta Beta; Calborn of Psi, and others, for their promptness and zeal in procuring new subscriptions. All but two of the chapters have sent in unusually large lists, and are constantly making additions to them.

Sigma subscribes for three copies for the chapter and a copy for each member. Thank s, brother Fearn. ·

Alpha Lambda thinks she has a fine show for those two prizes. We think so, too, if she continues sending in subscriptions as she has been doing lately.

All persons or chapters having extra copies of volume XI., number I, will please return them at once to the Business Managers.

In reply to inquiries as to the best method of disposing of the extra copies sent to the chapters, the Business Managers suggest that the Cor. Sec. request each member to furnish a list of all Betas with whom he is personally and geographically acquainted. The Cor. Sec. having collected the various lists, should examine them carefully, striking out duplicate names, assign them, and return lists at once. This being done, let every man see to it that each person on his list is addressed on the subject of subscriptions before the next meeting of the chapter. If this plan is followed out the chapters will soon be calling on the Business Managers for more papers instead of talking about returning what they have.

The boys will not forget the very handsome prizes offered by the Business Managers.

WANTED - We want at once the following copies of back numbers of the BETA THETA PI: Numbers I, 2, 3, 5, I2 of volume I.; numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, IO of volume III.; number I of volume IV.; numbers 7 and 8 (one copy) of volume V.; and number 4 of volume VI., for which we will exchange copy for copy numbers 7, 8, 9, 10 of volume I.; any number of volume II.; numbers 7, 8, 9, ro of volume IV.; numbers I, 2, 5, 8 of vt>lume V ; numbers I, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, volume VIII.; numbers I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, volume IX.; numbers I, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, volume X.

We also have several complete volumes of volumes VII., VIII., IX., X. Also bound volumes of the same years, which we will dispose of at $2.25 per volume. Address, F. M. Joyce.

Persons ordering back numbers must always enclose postage-two · cents per copy.

All of our subscribers who failed to receive number I of the present volume can obtain the same upon application to M.P. Drury