Hon. B. G. Northrop, in a letter dated April 4th, writes: “Sixteen states have adopted ‘Arbor Day,’ and to that result the article in The Chautauquan, and extracts quoted from it, have greatly contributed.”
The Bureau of Education sends out a pamphlet on “Arbor Day.” It will help many a teacher to an interest in the scheme, and will tell him what trees to select, how to plant them, and how to arrange a program suitable for the holiday.
The trouble which we have with foreign tongues sometimes enables us to heartily appreciate the blunders of the foreigner who tries our English tongue. We can not possibly make worse blunders with French than a late number of the aristocratic Révue des deux Mondes, when in its attempts to express in English the idea of a candidate favoring a railway it said, “My politic is railway.”
One might almost call Lord Tennyson’s verses on “The Fleet” the literary sensation of the month. It is rather difficult to see just why the verses deserve the unstinted ridicule American papers have given them. Certainly they are tame, but Lord Tennyson is an old man—a man whom this generation ought to honor for the noble pleasure he has left to it and to its posterity. Were his lines much worse, courtesy demands that we remember that with age comes decay.
The new Minister of Education in Greece, where the four Gospels are used as a reading book by the advanced classes in the primary department of the public schools, proposes to introduce them into the higher schools. The purity of the diction of the four Gospels makes them, regardless of other considerations, most desirable reading for children who are just forming their literary style.