ed homage that she offers
To the piano holds the foremost place.

For Turkish music, _vide_ GROVE and others,
Meant in the past the cymbals and big drum,
And piccolo, a group which wholly smothers
All other instruments and strikes them dumb.

Compared with this barbaric combination
The tinkling of the keys, so soft and clear,
Is lacking in explosive concentration,
And yet there's more in them than meets the ear.

At least, one reason for this revolution
Is plain; the keyboard, though its tones are cold,
Viewed as a means of rapid "execution"
Endears itself to Turks both Young and Old.

* * * * *

"M. Bratiano, Rumanian Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign
Affairs, has returned to Bukarest from Petrograd."--_The Times_.

The force of habit, we presume. How surprised the German Governor must
have been to see him.

* * * * *

[Illustration: AT THE EXHIBITION OF THE "FORERUNNERS' SOCIETY."

_Artist_. "I RATHER LIKE THAT." _Super-Critic._ "BAH! PRETTY-PRETTY!
CHOCOLATE BOX!"]

* * * * *

HEXAMETERS.

I have been examining a book by the POET LAUREATE, in which that learned
and painstaking man puts forward for general acceptance a new theory and
a new practice of metre in English poetry. It seems that our verse is
accentual, whereas it ought to be quantitative--or it may be the other
way about; my brain is in such a whirl with it all that I can't be
certain which is right, but I am sure that one of them is, and so I
leave you to take your choice. Failing that, you can buy Dr. BRIDGES'
book, which is entitled _Ibant Obscuri_ (Oxford University Press), and
thus expresses my inmost convictions about our great official poet and
his followers. We are henceforth to write hexameters in English on an
entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to
any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or
anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and
dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises up in
revolt against them.

That, at any rate, is my condition at this moment after going through a
course of them. I notice that the reviewers have been a little shy of
these hexametric efforts. They have mostly described them as
"interesting experiments" and have applauded Dr. BRIDGES for his
adventurous industry and his careful scholarshi