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is woefully defective. The moderns are prone to laugh at the strict regularity of eighteenth-century verse, yet the form of their own compositions would be immeasurably the better for a closer adherence to some of the old-fashioned rules.
Since the subject of plagiarism in its varying degrees has been brought to our notice so forcibly by the controversy between Messrs. Edward H. Cole and W. Paul Cook, The Conservative would like to know why the last sentence of his article in the July "New Member" was removed, and placed without credit at the back of the magazine as a motto.
It is to be regretted that Edward H. Cole confines his extraordinary talents so exclusively to the treatment of amateur journalistic affairs. Mr. Cole possesses a mind of unusual keenness and a prose style which cannot be approached in quality by that of any other amateur, yet his work is almost provokingly unvaried. It is really the duty of so thorough a scholar to exhibit his powers in matters of wider interest.
Mr. Ernest A. Dench of Brooklyn, a member of the United, and until his advent to America a British amateur of note, is one of the fortunate few who have published books to their credit. His treatise on "Playwriting for the Cinema" is a terse and readable exposition of the motion picture industry which stamps its author as a youth of more than ordinary ability.
The talented Chairman of the Department of Private Criticism writes The Conservative, who has been favored with the Chairmanship of the other Critical Bureau, that the reviews in The United Amateur show extreme strictness in dealing with the metrical irregularities of the amateur poets. To this charge The Conservative would like to reply, that he is really criticising the whole modern trend in verse-writing, rather than the individuals who exemplify its faults. In the present violent reaction against old-fashioned precision of metre, the art of versification is in danger of expiring. Form, harmony, even prosody itself, alike seem to be ignored by the majority today, so that some counter-reaction seems essential for the preservation of verse as we have hitherto known it. To blame the innocent amateur who merely falls into the errors of his time, the errors which are condoned and practiced by the best writers of the age, is obviously unjust; yet glaring violations of the established principles of prosody cannot be passed by unnoticed.
Wherefore, though The Conservative may appear to be something of a martinet in his conduct of the Department of Public Criticism, he desires to make it very plain that he is opposed not to his fellow-amateurs, but to that insidious breaking down of rhyme and metre which is one of the most regrettable features of contemporary literature.
