RECKING THE REDE LECTURE.
"His paramount aim was to make the world better by the humanising influences of literature."—Professor Jebb on Erasmus.
Friend of Colet and of More,
Genial wit and learned scholar,
Never pedant, prig, or bore.
Dulness and the Mighty Dollar
Rule too much our world of books;
Slang, sensation, crass stupidity;
Talk of "oof" and prate of "spooks,"
Sciolism, sheer aridity;
Smartness, which is folly decked
In true humour's cast-off raiment,
Clap-trap which has never recked
Aught save chance of praise and payment;
These our literature infest,
No Erasmus now arising,
Style to purge and taste to test
In the way of "humanising."
Could you but come back to us,
How you'd flay sensation-mongers,
Gird at gush, and flout at fuss,
Chasten morbid thirsts and hungers:
Puncture philosophic sham,
"Blugginess," the coarse erotic;
Show up callow Cockney "cram,"
Logic shallow, thought chaotic;
Lash our later Euphuism,
And the pseudo-Ciceronian;
Rottenness of "Realism,"
Battening in its bogs Serbonian.
Thanks, O philosophic Jebb!
In this age of advertising,
Literature, at a low ebb,
Needs a little "humanising."
"On, Stanley!"—The officer whom the explorer did not take with him was his left Tennant.
"'SHADOWING' MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT."
THE MODERN CORNELIA.
[Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Sempronius Gracchus, when a lady displayed her jewels to her, pointed to her two sons, exclaiming, "These are my jewels!">[
