stockholders. Provision is made for similar participation by national banks of the state if the comptroller will allow such action. This is the first guaranty deposit law ever enacted, though similar bills have been introduced in legislatures and in Congress. It is possible that other states will adopt such a measure, both to protect banks on their borders, in close proximity to states which have such a provision, and to restore confidence to depositors who have withdrawn large sums in the closing months of 1907. While there are weak points in such legislation and many bankers do not approve it, the plan appears exceedingly plausible to the average depositor, and its advocates believe that through the allaying of timidity it will bring stability in the volume of local deposits. Hence bankers are watching Oklahoma's experiment with interest. Little of mystery surrounds tiled floors, shining brass gratings, and polished counters in these latter days, when dozens of persons in the community are as able to possess the fixtures and the bank, too as the banker himself. The sciThe science of business and investment has become common knowledge in increasing measure, and, though many an undergraduate woefully overestimates his knowledge therein, all have acquired a passing acquaintance with financial methods that tends to sensible and sober dealings rather than to hysterics. In no one thing has the country banker made greater progress than in the arrangement of his surroundings - his banking-office and its accessories. Once it was thought that any room was good enough for the bank. It might be in the rear of a real-estate office, or in an ordinary storeroom, with cheap fixtures. With the advent of prosperity this has changed, and the banking-rooms, in the newer states particularly, are remarkable for their magnificence. This is not true alone of the large cities, nor of the boom banks that were built out on the prairies with Eastern ers' money. In straggling prairie towns stand some of the latter structures gorgeous, marble-pillared, ornately frescoed creations, now occupied chiefly by insurance agents and real-estate firms. These are the exceptions. Far out toward the Rocky Mountains, in the Mississippi Valley, in growing towns, are banking-houses that would surprise the Wall Street capitalist who is wont to think yet of the "American Desert." The floors are tiled, the walls are richly ornamented, the fixtures are brass and marble!-modern safes, adding machines, loose-leaf ledgers, vaults with electricwired burglar protection reaching to several central points of the town, safetydeposit boxes, electric lights, steam heat, mahogany desks- every convenience and every adornment that go into the office of the city banker's business home is here, though on a smaller scale. It is done both because the banks can afford it and because it has come to be recognized as due to the dignity of the busi ness. Even in the little towns is an effort to be distinctive. The frame building with the bank and post-office in the front end and living rooms of the cashier in the rear, is exceedingly simple, but into it the modern appliance has made its way, and labor-saving devices and other evidences of touch with the outside world are manifest. The country banker has had a varied experience in the past decade, - ranging from abundant prosperity, with deposits and profits heaping up faster than loans could safely be placed, to sudden reversal, when everybody looked askance at the bank doors, and for a few weeks caused managers of the soundest institutions sleepless nights and nervewracking days. Perhaps the sharp corrective was, on the whole, helpful, in that it emphasized the need of caution and preparation in such sensitive financial undertakings. It has also brought about a clearer comprehension of the relations of country banks to the reserve banks of THE POETRY OF LEIGH HUNT BY ARTHUR SYMONS THE poetry of Leigh Hunt has more importance historically than actually. Historically, it has its place in the romantic movement, where Leigh Hunt is seen fighting, though under alien colors, by the side of Wordsworth. His chief aim was to bring about an emancipation of the speech and metre of poetry, and he had his share in doing so. The early style of Keats owes much of its looseness and lusciousness to an almost deliberate modeling himself upon the practice and teaching of Hunt. "I have something in common with Hunt," Keats admitted, in a letter written in 1818; and the Quarterly, in its review of Endymion, defined Keats as a simple neophyte of the writer of The Story of Rimini." That poem had only been published two years, but had already made a small revolutionary fame of its own. valued. "rejection of superfluities," its correction of "mistakes of all kinds." It may be quite true, as the author protested, that the first edition contained weak lines, together with "certain conventionalities of structure, originating in his having had his studies too early directed towards the artificial instead of the natural poets." Yet, in fact, the second version is much more artificial than the first, and what was young, spontaneous, really new at the time, has given way to a firmer but less felicitous style of speech and versification. Such puerilities, of the kind which Hunt very nearly taught to Keats, as, What need I tell of lovely lips, and eyes, A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise? are indeed partly, though not wholly obliterated, and for the better; and the terrible line, revealing all Hunt's vulgarities at a stroke, She had stout notions on the marrying score, She had a sense of marriage, just and free. Yet what goes, and is ill supplied, is such frank bright speech as, — A moment's hush succeeds; and from the Firm and at once, a silver answer calls, For its actual qualities, this poetry, which seems now to have so slight an existence by the side of the still almost popular prose-writings, is not so easily disappears into the discreet — Infinite tiny sparks flicker throughout, but are rarely alight long enough to set a steady fire burning. One lyric, a few sonnets, an anecdote or two, a few of description or of diapassages logue, can we reckon up more than these in a final estimate of the value of this poetry as a whole? Yet are not these few successful things, each rare of its kind, themselves sufficient to make the reputation of one who was content to be remembered in whatever "humble category of poet, or in what humblest corner of the category," it remained for "another and wholly dispassionate generation" to place him? The Story of Rimini as it was published in 1816 is a very different thing from the revised version of 1832, with its The crowd are mute; and from the southern A lordly blast gives welcome to the call. Dante and the picture are spoiled. "The mode of treatment still remains rather material than spiritual," Hunt admits, without fully realizing how much he is losing in material beauty, and how incapable he is of replacing it by any kind of spiritual beauty. Byron, to whom The Story of Rimini is dedicated, said of it in a letter, "Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test." It has not stood the test, and is now quoted nowhere but in the footnotes to Keats; but it is full of those suggestions which lesser men are often at the pains of making for the benefit of their betters. All its "leafy" and rejoicing quality, its woodlands and painted "luxuries," were to have their influence, direct or reflected, on much of the romantic poetry of the century. Before writing The Story of Rimini, Hunt had published a satire in verse, called The Feast of the Poets, which he was to rewrite and republish at intervals during his life. It was the first of what was to be a series of bookish poems, in which he expressed the most personal part of himself, but that part which was best fitted perhaps for poetry. Few men have loved literature more passionately and more humbly than Leigh Hunt, or with a generosity more disinterested. Books were nearer to him than men, though he sought in books chiefly their human or pleasing qualities. But his poetry about books never passes from criticism to creation, as when Drayton writes his letter to H. Reynolds, and Shelley his letter to Maria Gisborne. We shall find no "brave translunary things" and no "hooded eagle among blinking owls." He tells us that what the public approved of in The Feast of the Poets was a "mixture of fancy and familiarity;" but the savor has only gone out of it. The criticism in the twentyfive pages of the poem is superficial and obvious, and the verse jingles like the bells on a fool's bauble. The criticism in the one hundred and twenty-five pages of the notes has still interest for us, if not value. There is always, in Leigh Hunt's criticism, something of haste and temporariness, and it is generally revised in every new edition. Here, the recognition, on second thoughts, that Wordsworth is the chief poet of the age, together with the good-natured, superior, and impertinent advice which he gives him for the bettering of his poetry, has something more than curiosity as coming from Leigh Hunt, and in 1814. The scorn of Southey, who "naturally borrows his language from those who have thought for him," remains good criticism, and there are phrases in a somewhat unjust estimate of Scott which are not without relevance; as when we are told that "he talks the language of no times and of no feelings, for his style is too flowing to be ancient, too antique to be modern, and too artificial in every respect to be the result of his own first impressions." He is reasonably fair to Crabbe, though with evident effort, and sees through Rogers without effort. But the accidental qualities of his taste betray themselves in the sympathetic praise of Moore, in the preference for "Gertrude of Wyoming," as "the finest narrative poem that has been produced in the present day," in the contemptuous reference to Landor as "a very worthy person," and to "Gebir” as "an epic piece of gossiping," and in the uncertainty and apparent distaste of what is meant to be said not unfavorably of Coleridge. In the final edition, nearly fifty years later, Coleridge, "whose poetry's poetry's self," is promoted to the place of Wordsworth. Hunt's miscellaneous mind was active, sympathetic, foraging; he made discoveries by some ready instinct which had none of the certainty of the divining rod; he was a freebooter, who captured various tracts of the enemy, but could not guard or retain them. He was among the first to help in breaking down the eighteenth-century formalism in verse, in let ting loose a free and natural speech; but his influence was not always a safe one. In 1829 Shelley writes to him, in sending the manuscript of "Julian and Maddalo:" "You will find the little piece, I think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms." It was just that proviso that Leigh Hunt neglected. What he really brings into poetry is a tone of chatty colloquialism, meant to give ease, from which, however, the vulgar idioms are not excluded. He introduces a new manner, smooth, free, and easy, a melting cadence, which he may have thought he found in Spenser, whom he chooses among poets "for luxury." The least lofty of English poets, he went to the loftiest among them only for his sensitiveness to physical delight. His own verse is always feminine, luscious, with a luxury which is Creole, and was perhaps in his blood. He would go back to such dainty Elizabethans as Lodge, but his languid pleasures have no edge of rapture; the lines trot and amble, never fly. Hunt mastered many separate tricks and even felicities in verse, and acquired a certain lightness and deftness which is occasionally almost wholly successful, as in an actual masterpiece of the trifling, like "Jenny kissed me." But he did not realize that lightness cannot be employed in dealing with tragic material, unless it is sharpened to so deadly a point as Byron and Heine could give to it. It is difficult to realize that it is the same hand which writes the line that delighted Keats, Places of nestling green for poets made, and, not far off, these dreadful lines, The two divinest things the world has got, The ignoble quality of jauntiness mars almost the whole of Hunt's work, in which liberty cannot withhold itself from license. The man who can wish a beloved woman To haunt his eye, like taste personified, cannot be aware of what taste really is; and, with a power of rendering sensation, external delicacies of sight and hearing, which is to be envied and outdone by Keats, he is never quite certain in his choice between beauty and prettiness, sentiment and sentimentality. In his later works Hunt learned something of restraint, and when he came to attempt the drama, though he tried to be at the same time realistic and romantic, was more able to suit his manner to his material. The Legend of Florence has his ripest feeling and his most chastened style, and more than anything else he did in verse reflects him to us as, in Shelley's phrase, "one of those happy souls Which are the salt of the earth." The gentle Elizabethan manner is caught up and revived for a moment, and there is a human tenderness which may well remind us of such more masterly work as "A Woman killed with Kindness." Hunt was convinced that "we are more likely to get at a real poetical taste through the Italian than through the French school," and he names together Spenser, Milton, and Ariosto, thinking that these in common would "teach us to vary our music and to address ourselves more directly to nature." Naming his favorite poets, he begins with "Pulci, acquaint English taste with Italian for spirits and a fine free way." To models he did many brilliant translations, Dante being less perfectly within his means than Ariosto or Tasso. He was best and most at his ease in rendering the irregular lines of Redi, whose "Bacchus in Tuscany " he translated in full. In this, and in the version from the Latin of Walter de Mapes, there is a blithe skill which few translators have attained. It was through his fancy for Italian bur |