The fourth number of the Advocate appeared yesterday afternoon. It is with pleasure that we mark the steady improvement which is characterizing the work published in this paper since the beginning of the college year. More than anywhere else has the Advocate improved in its editorial columns. The editorials are written with much care and in very good taste, and are notable for the strength and vigor of their style and the uncompromising tone which they take against what the editorial staff recognize as evil in our college community. The comments on football well deserve careful consideration and the points against the formation of a new sophomore literary society are excellently taken.

"On Boston Bridge" are the opening verses of the number and are very happily conceived. "Jerusha Howe," spinster, is a good story, and stands in interesting contrast with "Roses and Cypress" in the last Advocate by the same author. In both stories the light coquetry and vanity of a pretty young girl brings on the death of her lover. This motive, always a fascinating one, is as well brought out in the hills up here in our bleak New England during the Revolution as it was in the warm sun of the Riviera. A bright poem entitled "Letters" follows this, and tells a world of woe in a very few words. "Around Judith," an account in the happiest vein of the recent Harvard trip down to New York on board the Fall River boat, cannot fail to amuse every one who reads. There is not a dull line in it and there are not a few passages that fairly dance with vividness. When one learns, as I happened to to-day, that the writer was not on the boat at all, one must the more admire the imagination that could give such a lively picture of the trip. The gathering of the various cliques is very humorously described and evidences much observation.

"O Poet of the Dawn" is a rather more ambitious poem than has appeared in the Advocate for some time. It has a great many points of merit, and, barring some few lines, appears sincere and coming from the heart not from the rhymester, as so much of college poetry does, alas. The stanzas-

"Then sing not, poets, if your song

Hath naught of hope for man;

To him that grieveth, life is long

However brief its span."

And-

"A flush of light smiles on our eyes,

Night speeds the world forsaking;

O poet of the Dawn, arise,

The glorious morn is breaking."

- are particularly beautiful in thought and in form.

"The Meaning of the Georgics" is a very appreciative study and points out with clearness the true spirit in which Virgil wrote these poems. The layman or the cursory reader is too apt to see in the Georgics nothing deeper than rustic romanticism of the idylls, and it is well to call attention to their real character.

The last number, "Where Prophecy Failed," is a story not marked by any particular brilliancy or beauty. Among the "Items" is a neat little anti-climax called "Lines to My Lady."