An interesting letter on distinctively American folk songs was lately printed in the London Spectator. The writer evidently knows his America unusually well. After saying that the fine old negro melodies are only a part of the American field, he continues:

'Among the "poor white" mountaineers of Kentucky there has been found a store of songs, many of them Elizabethan in origin, which have not yet been driven from favor by the ubiquitous gramophone. One of these, preserved in all probability since the days of Raleigh, has haunted my memory ever since I heard it a year ago in New York. It is a singularly beautiful version of "The Lowland Sea" which has survived among a people who knew of the sea only so much as might be gleaned from travelers' tales! In this field Cecil Sharp has done valuable work in the publication of two volumes of words and melodies from the Appalachians.

"To the same stock belong the English, Scottish, and Irish songs which have been preserved in New England.

'In the West I heard snatches, remembered from a boyhood in Vermont, which were strangely familiar to my ears, while in Vermont itself Mrs. Warren Sturgis has collected some fifty songs, twelve of which, tastefully arranged and carefully annotated, have been published under the title Songs from the Hills of Vermont. But all these are of alien origin, and to me the most interesting songs are those which were wrought and sung in log cabins by pioneers and frontiersmen.

'One meets with these in strange places, as often in New York as in Wyoming, but wherever they have been carried by the movement of population never do they lose the peculiar frontier quality. The war indeed inintroduced many Britons to the sad tale of Casey Jones of the Santa Fé; even the splendid "Cowboys' Lament" has been heard in our messes. This latter is highly characteristic of the cowboy songs (it hails from Texas); but "Frankie," especially in its original form, is more dramatic. There are several versions of this song, all restrained in substance but horribly profane in expression. All, that is, except that for which my thanks are due to the Y. W. C. A., as the girl who sang it had learned it at one of their Conferences in the Middle West. The air is simple and no less effective than the words:

Now Frankie was a good woman as éverybody knows.

She saved up all her eárnings just to búy her Albert clothes.

Chorus:

He was her man, that's right he was, an' he done her wrong.

And Frankie went to the corner saloon to get her a glass of beer.

And Frankie says to the bar-tender: "S my Albert bin in here?'

An' the bar-tender says: 'Miss Frankie, I bain't goin' ter tell no lie,

Yer Albert was in here 'bout 'n hour ago with a woman as looked like a spy.'

Then Frankie she went home, but she did n't go for fun.

She reached down in her stocking and pulled out a '44 gun.

THE Abbey Theatre, unusually prolific this season in new productions, presented recently a new play by Mr. Brinsley MacNamara, The Land for the People. Mr. MacNamara, who is better known as novelist than playwright, is a specialist in realism-sordid realism, his critics complain. They have this corroborative testimony, that the people of the Meath village from which he drew a recent novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows, resorted in revenge to 'direct action' against his family. The Land for the People, Mr. MacNamara's second play, and in construction and dialogue a marked advance upon his first, is realistic enough; but his characters are much less unpleasant on the stage than in print. As its title suggests, the play deals with

that part of the Irish land question which is still unsettled the break-up of the large grazing ranches. It joins the already considerable company of those Abbey plays in which drama is subordinated to propaganda.

With this production the Abbey Theatre has given up the unequal contest against the 10 o'clock curfew. The management has tried first 6.30, and then 7 o'clock, as the hour for the rise of the curtain, but houses have been consistently poor. Now it has suspended performances until St. Stephen's Day, by when, it is hoped, the curfew rule will be relaxed.

Literary Gossip

PERHAPS this story is not literary gossip; but it is gossip, and it has more bearing on the real problem of modern literature than most incidents related in this column. Moreover, it is authentic. A lady fell into conversation with a porter at Waterloo station. He said he had six children, five boys. 'What are you going to do with them?' "They're all going into the army, M'm,' and he showed his own 1914 star. 'But have n't you had enough of soldiering?' 'Enough—well, M'm. My father was a soldier; my grandfather was a soldier, and my great-grandfather was under Wellington when he beat the French on this very bit of ground you're standing on.'

'Affable Hawk' on Rabelais (From his criticism of Todhunter's Essays)

I TURNED, first, to an essay on being 'in search of a subject,' for here was a chance of testing how entertainingly and easily the author could ramble: an essay is a winding road. Subjects like so many hares were gamboling just out of sight of his mind when he sat down to write; a predicament which is

the test of the essayist. Soon he is in pursuit of more hares than he can catch. He thinks of Lamb and then of punning retorts, and he repeats one of my own favorites, that of the Corsican Lady to Napoleon, who, when he said. savagely that 'All Corsicans were liars,' replied: 'Non tutti, sire; ma Buona Parte.' I think Todhunter would have appreciated, too, the reproof of the royal lady who was annoyed by George IV's off-hand manners, when he whipped up his coat tails, exclaiming, 'It's very cold,' and stooped backward into the fireplace- 'I am glad to see Your Majesty is warming it.'

From punning and retorts he glides into discussing Sterne, but before settling down to that he has touched on Rabelais and Rabelais' predecessor Villon. About both he says some good brief things, but he does not really enjoy Rabelais. "There is something pathetic, surely, in the grinning of mankind over a filthy joke,' he says, 'and in Rabelais this pathos assumes as gigantic proportions as the tears of Gargantua.' Nor does he really enjoy Rabelais' energetic exuberance. 'Only the broad smile of self-confident good humor, and the genial zest, with which this Silenus of Satirists welcomes you to his Gargantuan feast makes its coarse profusion tolerable.' Note the adjective 'tolerable' and then estimate how astonishing that zest must be, how strong that good humor, to wring even the word 'tolerable' from one who emphatically does not belong to the category of the tough-minded. No one need like Rabelais; indeed, it is better that those who do not do so naturally should not try to like him. It does no one any harm to try to like Milton or Molière indeed, they will be much the better for making a little successful effort. But to force one's self to like Rabelais means doing too much violence to natural inclination. You must,

to start with, be conscious of man, not civilized man, but man, the creature, as a ridiculous animal.

Rabelais sends my spirits up; I am rid for the time of the burden of respect. I do not think all his jokes very good; some of them, if I weighed them as jokes, would pass only as horseplay, and often poor horseplay at that. But then, I never do weigh his jokes; I catch instead an exhilaration from the page such as I have got from watching a school of plunging porpoises. And he tells a story so well; every incident is narrated with unmatched vigor. He seems to me a very simple philosopher, at bottom a physician rather than a thinker. It is wholesome for men to laugh, and the kind of laughter that is best is the broad, releasing kind, which brings with it a sense of freedom and neither answers nor raises any of the questions, moral or intellectual, which perplex their heads. He is an inspirer of courage and a condition of the spirits which is at once homely and extravagant. His pages are excellent to read aloud, especially to one's self. Indeed, a page of Rabelais should be shouted at the top of one's voice- and few listeners will stand that.

Humor is often cumulative in its effect. I remember seeing in a Harlequinade years ago, a dismal, shabby man in black saunter on to the stage, and begin singing under the window of a room where Clown and Pantaloon had retired to sleep, 'Every night at half-past eight, there's somebody knocking at the garden gate.' He had sung his distich perhaps three times, when both heads appeared at the window; a jug of water followed. The singer continued; in spite of coal, flour, inexhaustible douches, missiles of all sorts, he continued. Now the scene only began to be funny when one thought it must stop, and that is precisely the point where Rabelais begins

'AWFUL moments?' I said. 'Why, of course life is full of them. Let me think

"To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen looking at one's self in a street-mirror, or overheard talking of the Ideal to a duchess; to refuse nuns who come to the door to ask for subscriptions; to be given by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she has written full of mystical slip-slop, or dreadful musings in an old-world garden

Logan Pearsall Smith in 'New Trivia.'

Mr. Santayana

ONE of the best signs of the return of the world consciousness to order and sanity is the extraordinary growth of the influence of Professor George Santayana. His books sell in England by the ten thousand, and Logan Pearsall Smith has just issued a collection of essays drawn from Santayana's work which has met with the widest approval. Commenting on this turn of the cultivated mind, the Athenæum remarks: 'It may be that his unfailing sanity, his discipline without asceticism, his complete absence of superstition or of fanaticism, are merely Greek; not the wisdom of disillusionment, of the failure to achieve harmony, but the wisdom that comes of

its successful achievement. And from the standard of this achieved harmony he can assign a rank and function to each of our partial ideals, whether they be embodied in a philosophic system, a great literature, a decaying religion, or the multitudinous and purblind activities of a modern nation.'

The Beggar's Opera

JOHN GAY'S Beggar's Opera, which has had the run of the year in London may be produced in America next autumn. A critic in the Times thus writes of the British production:

'Just as Gay's dialogue prompts you to say "Gilbert," so Mr. Lovat Fraser's scenery and costumes prompt you to exclaim "Hogarth"! By the way, on one of Hazlitt's visits he records the exclamation of an old gentleman in the pit, after the scuffle between Peachum and Lockit, "Hogarth, by G-d!" This was, no doubt, a tribute to the grim, ugly squalor of that particular

scene. But the whole décor and atmosphere of the present affair are Hogarthian the stiff, flattened hoops of the women, the tatterdemalion aspect of Macheath's rabble, Peachum's dressing gown (which I suppose is “documentary"), Macheath's scarlet coat and flowing wig. And the dresses are accurately simple. The women wear plain stuffs; Polly alone is allowed a little finery. Indeed, there is an almost austere simplicity about the whole affair.

'One scene, with just the alteration of a few accessories, serves for Peachum's house, for a tavern, and for Newgate. There is an orchestra of five strings, a flute, an oboe, and a harpsichord. It seems to me that their playing has the delicate charm of chamber music rather than the power and color of orchestral - but I must not stray out of my province.'

WE started, certainly, much too late. Marathon is only fifteen miles from Athens, but the direct path lies over Pendéli (as the marble mountain Pentelikon is now happily called), and we meant to walk most of it; Greek mountains, moreover, are hard and rough going. We had almost resigned ourselves to defer it; but the noonday sun shone gloriously, and by a common impulse we three young archæologists shut up our large tomes, rushed off to change into our kit and collect provisions, and presently found ourselves in the motor-bus for Cephisia, a beautiful resort to the northeast of Athens. The way was lined with trees and groves; at Cephisia itself you hear the sound of running water, rare in this arid land; while above its white houses and luxuriant gardens soar the shapely peaks of Pendéli, the bare white marble flashing from its huge buttresses. Our route lay over the northern shoulder of the mountain, by the village which first welcomed the stranger god Dionysus to Attica (how else should it still bear his name Diónyso?), and was also the birthplace of Thespis; then down through a deep and wild ravine to the Plain of Marathon, just at the place where the Greeks are supposed to have encamped all those days before the battle.

Over fragments of Pentelic marble we wound upward through a delicious heath-like country of pines and firs, huge boulders and rocky knolls. Suddenly, at the ridge we looked down upon the sea and the Plain of Mara

thon, still a long way off, and a tumbled wilderness of ravines stretching toward it from our feet. At that sight no words came to any of us. That small strip of dead level plain, with the stream winding sluggishly through its marshes toward the sea, seemed destined by nature for some great moment in history-the only bit of flat ground the eye could see amid the riot of beautiful mountain contours.

By this time it was late afternoon, and we lost no time in plunging down into the shadow of the ravine. The doubtful path soon vanished, and for two hours we toiled along, through thick brushwood and undergrowth the beautiful, formidable shrubs of Greece, full of aroma and thorns, pungent in both senses at once. Adventures accumulated in the gathering dusk; crossing of torrents which grew bigger and wilder as we descended; scrambles up ridges attracted by the profile of a hut or a human figure silhouetted on the skyline; encounters with a Wallachian shepherd, who spoke Greek and even understood ours, but assured us that we could not possibly find our way down before night; and with troops of fierce dogs, who made the hillside ring with their baying as we approached, but proved susceptible, happily, to the argument of the lifted stone. We were already considering which of the boulders near would make the best shelter for the night, when one of us descried a white bell-tower sticking up apparently out of the earth at our feet. It was the