Battle on Whist") to the higher salesmanship and New Year's resolutions, from Percy Mackaye's community drama to the sorrows of automobiling and tabloid versions of the American Magazine, Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post. And whenever he passes, one feels, if not better, yet more cheerful about things.
Frank Moore Colby has a professorial record in the background of his journalistic career; and he doesn't write with the abandon and gay incoherence of the "colyumist" who has never lost sleep by asking himself whether contributing to Vanity Fair is not infra dig. His title, however, The Margin of Hesitation, denotes him truly as one who has attained the right temper of the periodical essayist, the tolerant smiling skepticism of the literary newspaper man, who first writes out a blanket acceptance of the universe and then proceeds to question everything in it, not wholesale and with a shout like the editor of a radical weekly, but bit by bit, softly, like an epicure questioning the flavor of a glass of grapejuice. "The new thinker," says Mr. Colby thoughtfully, "is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought." Later he remarks in an excellent discourse on "The Pleasures of Anxiety:" "In middle-aged conversation there is always a certain coziness in political despair, and the thought of a large general disaster coming on has, at any rate, one bright side in the way it warms up elderly conversers." He, himself, reads for recreation the alarming radical journals which his
