Please observe that if Homer had actually written that last line, it would have been quoted for nearly three thousand years as one of the deepest sayings ever said. Orators would still be rounding out their speeches with the majestic phrase (in Greek), “Some men can hold their jobs”; essayists would open their most scholarly dissertations with the words, “It has been finely said by Homer that some men can hold their jobs”; and the clergy in the mid-pathos of a funeral sermon would lift an eve skyward and echo, “and some can not.”
This is what I should like to do: I’d like to take a large stone and write on it--
“_The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery, primitive music, and primitive medicine,_”
--and then throw it through the windows of a UNIVERSITY and hide behind a fence to see the professors buzz!
There has long been current in New Haven what is sure to be an apocryphal story of college loyalty, told at the expense of Anson Phelps Stokes, the popular secretary of Yale. Secretary Stokes is an ordained clergyman in the Episcopal Church, and, so the story goes, as he was once journeying west on the train in non-clerical garb, a man of the self-appointed missionary type approached, and asked him solemnly:
“I beg your pardon, sir, but are you a Christian man?”
The man turned to go, saying in a deeply offended tone:
“Well, I only asked you if you were a Christian man. I don’t see--”
Impulsively, Dr. Stokes caught him by the arm.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I beg your pardon. I thought you asked me if I was a Princeton man!”
RYMBEL.--Suddenly, of weariness, at his home in Lighter Vein; Rondeau Rymbel, aged two months. Please omit flowers.
Above the plate-glass window-pane, Inviting every passing gaze, Hung an inscription, large and plain, “_THE HUSBAND SHOP_.” This, in amaze, Clorinda seeing, stopped wide-eyed, And stared, then turned and stepped inside.
A floor-walker whose faultlessness And condescending air proclaimed One of the _table d’haute noblesse_, Approached Clorinda and exclaimed, With graceful undulating palm: “Something in husbands? _Oui, Madame._”
“We have the latest thing of all In husbands; kindly step this way. We’re using them on hats this fall, In place of plume or floral spray, The creature being pinned or tied With chiffon bows on either side.”