at a little brazier in one corner of the room. Two or three Moors were playing on guembris, two-stringed guitars, and on a kind of tambourine made of pottery, shaped like a spindle, open at one end, and closed with parchment at the other.

The remaining guests

chanted a monotonous song to this accompaniment, meanwhile beating their hands.

Several of our Moorish friends kept us company until we left, partly to entertain us, and partly to prevent our falling into the grain-pits where they store their harvest. These are close to the roadway, and are cunningly concealed to prevent theft. The merras, or village watchman, who guards the grain, saluted us as we passed.

Leaving the village and returning toward the city, we passed many women bowed under the weight of enormous bundles of wood and grass, and also carrying, in many cases, an infant swung by a band in front of them. Will it be possible for Spain to bring the blessing of modern civilization, as we understand it, to these villagers? To accomplish that, we shall have to overcome many prejudices, some of which are based on religion and others on the traditional indolence of a race which regards destiny as something fixed beforehand, and which condenses its philosophy of life in these few words: 'Everything that will ever happen already stands written to-day in the book of God.'

M. BERGSON RETIRES

THE retirement of M. Henri Bergson from the faculty of the Collège de France, after forty years of service, is said on reliable authority to be due to three motives: his failing health, his desire to escape from the 'lime-light, and two ambitious pieces of research, which will complete his lifework and require all his energy for years to come. M. René Gillouin, writing in L'Europe Nouvelle, explains that the famous philosopher, now past sixty, is suffering from neuralgia and unable to bear the heavy burdens of his official position.

As is well known, Professor Bergson's fame has spread with embarrassing rapidity in fashionable Parisian circles, so that his lecture-rooms are often swarming with the élite of the city, who profess to be Bergsonians without in the least understanding what that philosophy implies. From all this M. Bergson naturally desires to retire into a scholar's solitude, where he will devote himself to giving final form to a series of essays which are the suite to L'Energie Spirituelle. In the preface to these he will sum up his philosophical doctrine, and examine its relation to the theories of Einstein. This task completed, he will undertake an exhaustive examination of the moral ideas of the human race.

M. Paul Souday wrote an article in Le Temps, soon after M. Bergson's retirement was announced, in which he described what he believed to be a similarity between his thought and that of Taine and Renan. M. Gillouin, refuting this view, sheds some interesting light on M. Bergson's approach

to his subjects. It is, of course, well known, that five years of preliminary study of aphasia went before the writing of Matière et Mémoire, and ten years' examination of evolutionary literature preceded L'Evolution Créatrice. But, says M. Gillouin: -

When M. Bergson devoted five years to the study of aphasia, it was not merely to assemble all the cases of the disease which had been described in special works, and to make a complete collection of them; it was to criticize them, not in the literary, but in the philosophical sense of that term. M. Bergson thought he saw that the physicians who described the phenomena of aphasia mingled in their descriptions, without being really aware of it, certain preconceived ideas of philosophical or metaphysical origin, which were not involved in the facts themselves, and that all his effort after that ought to tend toward disengaging these brute factsor, more exactly, these positive facts from the arbitrary interpretations in which they were enwrapped. It was only when this disentanglement was once accomplished, that he could set out in quest of a correct interpretation, exactly based on fact itself. It was on this narrow but immovable base of a sound theory of the relations between language and thought that he must set up his whole conception at that time so novel, though it has since been absorbed by the popular mind - of the relations between the physical and the moral, spirit and matter, soul and body. In the same way, for L'Evolution Créatrice, it was upon a pitiless and definitive critique of the evolutionism of Spencer considered as an arbitrary superposition of preconceived ideas upon the facts of biology, ontogeny, and palæontology that M. Bergson set up his neo-transformism. In other words, philosophy, as M. Bergson understands it, requires that one be, first a scholar, then a critic, then a metaphysician.

THE PLIGHT OF ENGLISH CLASSICAL

STUDIES

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ENGLISH universities have long been regarded as the last stronghold of literæ humaniores. Consequently, it is surprising to find that a committee appointed by the Prime Minister to inquire into the place of Greek and Latin in the English educational system has submitted a report which shows a falling off in these studies almost comparable to that in the United States. The committee was made of twenty members, men and women, including heads of schools and colleges, and scholars of acknowledged reputation, all of whom are advocates of the study of the classical languages. They examined the situation in all of the British universities and found reason for grave misgiving. Even in the older universities the number of students reading for Classical Honors bears no proportion to the increase in students, and in the newer universities the situation is still worse. In the public schools few boys are learning Greek and there is a tendency to drop Latin after the middle and lower forms.

The classics found championship in an unexpected quarter when the witnesses who came before the committee to represent the Labor Party declared that they 'looked forward to schools which would do for the workers what Eton, Harrow, and Winchester have done for other classes in the past,' and asserted that the wider outlook which

increasing democracy will require of the worker is best to be attained by the study of the classics in the continuation schools.'

The committee made recommendations for encouraging classical study.

CHINESE HUMOR

IF jokes about Jews and Irishmen ever wear out, a world that must needs

laugh will probably fall back upon the rich store of anecdotes current in China, which are as yet scarcely known to other nations. The Chinese have a strong sense of the ridiculous. They delight in making jokes, and are even broad-minded enough not to mind being paid back in their own coin.

Mr. W. Hopkyn Rees of the London School of Oriental Studies has recently translated a number of the lively and amusing stories which have lightened his scholarly labors in Chinese. One of the best of them has for its theme the hard lot of the hen-pecked husband.

Ten husbands who had good reason to commiserate each other met in a temple and exchanged views on the situation. They agreed to burn incense before a god, to declare themselves sworn brothers for mutual protection, and to have a feast to inaugurate the

club which was to deliver them from the tyranny of their wives

When the feast was in full swing, ten angry wives arrived at the temple. Nine of the blood brothers sought hiding-places from which they might view the proceedings in security. One brother remained in his place, and, though the women scolded him, he took not the least notice. The ladies got tired of talking and departed, and the nine emerged. 'Our brother is the most courageous,' they said, 'we will make him president of the club.' They approached him. 'Alas! alas! our chief, while sitting there, has died of fear, and is now with the saints!'

THE BURN'S MANUSCRIPTS

ROBERT BURNS's family Bible has been sold to the trustees of the Burns Cottage and Memorial at Ayr, and is to be returned to the cottage immediately. It was purchased by Mr. T. C. Dunlop, secretary of the trustees, for £450. In the Bible the family name is spelled

'Burnes,' a spelling which the poet later dropped. This Bible was sold seventeen years ago for £1,560, Messrs. Quaritch, the owners, having apparently accepted the lower price in view of the fact that the book was to be placed in the Memorial. Another relic secured was the complete autograph manuscript of 'The Jolly Beggars,' which sold for £450.

A fortnight later a complete manuscript copy of Tam o' Shanter, originally made by the poet for presentation to De Cardonnel Lawson, was sold to a private purchaser for £500. The manuscript is of some importance, containing as it does the lines, later excised by Burns, which described the exhibits of 'auld Nick's haly table':

Three Lawyers' tongues turned inside out Wi' lies seamed like a beggar's clout; Three Priests' hearts, rotten, black as muck, Lay stinking, vile, in every neuk.

The omission of these lines in the published version of the poem is said to have been due to the representations of friends, who finally dissuaded Burns from sending them to the printer. Burns presented the manuscript to Mr. Lawson in 1790, the year of the composition of the poem, after they had met at the home of Robert Riddel of Friar's Carse.

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MAXIM GORKY'S CHILDHOOD

MAXIM GORKY's memories of his childhood have been translated into French, under the title Ma Vie d'enfant, by M. Serge Persky, who has made available a work of great value to students of Russian literature. The novelist's recollections do not, as a French critic observes, form ‘a nice book,' but they have the merit of aiding in the comprehension of one of the most significant Russian writers of the day. Hitherto Gorky has always been content to let the veil hang before

the days of his youth, although many of his books had made clear enough the bitterness of those days. Indeed, it was only as a concession to the requests of his friends that he at length wrote the present work, of which M. Émile Henriot says in L'Europe Nouvelle:

A unique book, horrible and yet powerful, so black is the painting, a nightmare vision of primitive humanity, far from us and yet near, and with it all, so different, in which, as in ancient Flemish paintings, one sees the contortions of the damned and of the evil angels.

The beginning of the book is sufficiently gruesome ciently gruesome-Gorky's recollection of his father's death, and the birth of a posthumous child, which died before the father's funeral. Of the burial he recalls only one detail, the little toads that leaped into the open grave and were buried alive under the shovelfuls of earth thrown on the dead man, an incident morbid enough even for a Russian novelist.

The household to which the little Russian boy went afterward was scarcely calculated to efface the impression. His mother soon disappeared, and he grew up in the household of his grandfather, head of the dyers' guild, in which also lived two brutal uncles, who on one occasion tried to drown him in a pool, and who later, by compelling their father to divide his property between them, drove him into ruin. The only bright spot in Gorky's life at this time was his old grandmother, who, though she took refuge from her household cares in drink, was otherwise sweet-tempered, gay, and always ready to tell stories to the future novelist. Of her he writes:

Before she came, I slumbered, sunk in I know not what shadow; but she came, she wakened me, and she took me to the light. ... She kept between my soul and the world outside, a narrow bridge of light, and