as well speak out our own opinions in our own fashion, without pretentiousness or affectation. But this manner of writing does not by any means imply superficiality or flimsiness of thought. It is quite possible to have a completely and sympathetically thought-out conception of an idea or a man, and yet to be natural in expression. Indeed a man who has a thorough and familiar acquaintance with his thought is more likely to be familiar and easy in its expression.

There is another fault of style which is seen in college criticism not so often as these other two, but which when it does occur, is almost as bad. This is a mildness, amounting often to dullness, resulting from excessive re-writing and refinement, which destroys the native vigor of the thought. Pieces which are rude but forcible are commonly more readable than those which are polished into tame perfection. This is indeed a fault not often seen. The tendency is generally the other way. But when it does occur, it is usually in the work of men of more than ordinary ability and ambition, and so is doubly harmful.

We have thus attempted to point out some of the principal and most obvious faults of college criticism, not for the sake of giving advice, but for the sake of thus proving that criticism has a place in college writing. For though these faults are indeed serious in their effect on the writing, they appear less serious when it is considered that in the case of the tasteful, thoughtful, persistent man they can be remedied. Proof of the fact that they can be remedied, as well as proof that there are men of good ability who have not remedied them in themselves, is often seen in college writing, spoken and published. If they can be and are remedied to a reasonable extent, so that criticism of some merit is produced, criticism certainly has a place in college writing, for in a place of training like a college, merit is a sufficient excuse for the existence of writing of any class.

But however good it may be, its place exists for the most part not because of any value it may have as literature. To be sure, it is not infrequently interesting and

sometimes suggestive and useful to its readers. There is no reason why it should not be if the writer has reasonable ability, for the thought of young men, from the freshness with which impressions come into their minds, has sometimes an unusual and very pleasant life and newness of appreciation.

But the value of college criticism is not so much in this way. If it has merit enough to give it a reason for existence, its value will be more in the gifts which the writers receive from the labor necessary to produce writing of merit, in increase of literary knowledge and training of thought and expression, and in its helping through its effects on them and the influence which their example exerts for the growth of literary interest toward that end for which we all are or ought to be striving—the improvement of what is called in those familiar words of venerable antiquity "the average literary culture of the University." Robert H. Nichols.

SONNET.

Calmly, serenely gleam the stars to night
Over the swaying city's sin-tossed streets;
Above, the eye enraptured gently greets
The lands of peace and love and dazzling light,
And life seems grand and pure and infinite;

And here below man's heart, earth-fettered, beats
Unsleeping through these star-lit hours, and meets
But sin and woe and shame the darken'd sight!

Yet, in those silent worlds may there not be

Souls that can look upon our distant star;

See not our world-worn hearts? upon whose sight

Seen through the golden, dim immensity

Our earthly planet casts its rays afar,

One pure and shining spark of diamond light?

Burton J. Hendrick.

IN

DeForest Prize Oration:

JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN.

By WINTHROP EDWARDS DWIGHT, of New Haven.

N the company of modern skeptics stands no more interesting figure than that of Ernest Renan. It seems such an odd irony of fate by which a man born in an atmosphere of sentiment and devoutness, and trained in the quiet cloisters of religious houses, should be chosen for the part of skeptic on the modern stage. The estimate which the future will make of the man, and of the character and value of the part he played in modern thought, will be equally removed from the acrid criticisms of pious clergy thirty years ago, and from the eulogies of his personal friends at his death less than a year since. But whatever this estimate is, it can only be just, as it takes into account the story of his early life which he told himself, in his later years, with all the charm of complete sincerity.

Renan's birthplace, the quaint province of Brittany, is the last home of that unworldly, unpractical, Celtic race, which material progress has banished to this quiet out-ofthe-way corner of the earth. On that lonely coast is still kept much of the genuine spirit of the Arthurian stories. and of the legends of St. Brandan and of the Holy Grail. The very breath of the spirit of the Celt is idealism. It is in his deepest nature, the yearning after and pursuit of some ideal, often wild and impossible, but always sought with enthusiasm and consecration. The quest of the Holy Grail is, in a way, the embodiment of the whole life of the people. Other races have had a far stronger hold upon the things of this world, and have attained its prizes of power and success. But no race has held so strongly, in its weakness, as in its strength, to the reality of an unworldly hope.

In such surroundings Renan absorbed sentiment and idealism, as a child, with the very atmosphere of the place,

with his love for the old mystical legends, and his reverence for the pure and saintly Breton priests. When he left these influences, it was only to seek the home of the deepest and truest Christian learning in the land. It is hard for us to appreciate the unworldly spirituality of this quiet scholar's life in these places. Yet it was in the midst of this that the great change came for him. These years, in fact, tell the story of how the devout and severe study of Christianity left Renan with not enough faith to be a sincere priest, yet inspired him with far too much reverence to play an odious comedy with this most noble of creeds. The time came, at last, when he withdrew his allegiance from the mother church, no longer to be numbered among her sons. For him, henceforth, Science is to be the only guide to life. Yet as he leaves the cloister gates we fancy him lingering a moment in uncertainty. Behind him rises the old church, with all the memories and the deepest feeling of his early life. He stands listening, as he said, to the faint chiming of the church bells, calling to holy offices a worshiper who refuses to hear them. Do what he would, those echoes of his early self kept ringing in his ears, till his skepticism seemed only half-hearted, at times a mere crust of affectation over the deeper nature of the man. Renan remained, to the end, an incurable idealist.

In all the varied work of his later life he strove to appear as an avowed disbeliever, a philosopher whose confidence is based on science alone. But his old religious nature was too strong for him. He attacked the very foundations of the Christain faith; but he tried to persuade himself and the world, that he had not attacked the validity of the faith at all. "I believe to have served the cause of religion," he said, "by carrying it into the region of the inattackable, far above partial dogmas and supernatural beliefs. All definition is limitation. The truths of the spirit are wider than any account of them in human speech." These sentences contain the essence of Renan's belief. They tell us that what he meant by religion was merely an aspiration after the ideal. He had proved to his own satisfaction that religion was an illusion.

But, true to his idealistic spirit, he still clung to the religious emotions and aspirations which no longer had any basis of truth.

You say there is no
Why ask us to keep

The ordinary man, who is less of a dreamer than Renan, can find nothing to believe in a fiction like this. If the meaning and the heart be thus torn out of life, it is all very well to say to him, as Renan has said: "Religion consists, for all of us, in singing while we do our work, and in praising God, from morning till night, by cheerfulness, good humor, and patience." The man will merely answer: "To what end is all this? God, how then can we praise him? on living our life in terms which you expressly declare have no meaning whatever." Renan felt that the mass of common workers in the world, if deprived of their religion, could find no comfort or hope in such vague fancies as these. And his solution of this difficulty was heroic. "Better," he said, "that the people should worship in a narrow and false creed, than be told a truth which they cannot comprehend, and which can only lead them astray." So he would have them still bring their sorrows and hopes to a God who he says does not exist. And, more than this, the priest, who knows that this is a mockery, is serving the great cause of truth and righteousness by keeping up the pious delusion! Such a cynical notion as this can only come from one whose religion is full of inconsistency. Renan had tried to be a thorough skeptic; but his old idealistic and religious nature held him back; and he contented himself with pleasant emotions and aspirations, the very objects of which he had set himself to disprove; satisfied himself with an illusion, because he had not the courage to face the doubt which underlies it; made of the mere fragments of a faith which he had destroyed, a new belief which he presented to the world as greater and better than the lost faith. And with all the weakness of his reasoning and the real contradiction of his whole position, he stood for serious men as their guide in matters of faith.