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Show That was a very vivid exchange of anathemas in the last issue of Collier's between Thomas W. Lawson of frenzeid finance and temperament and Mr. Norman Hapgood, who agitates a facile pen for that creditable journal. Lawson hurls himself him-self against Hapgood like a detachment of infuriated in-furiated cavalry, and Hapgood parries the attack at-tack like a fencing master with a dangerous pupil. It is the sort of literary contest that might have been expected between the fiery Ivan the Terrible and that doleful moralist, Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Wil-cox, and in this case the honors certainly appear to be with the modern Ivan. Lawson's characterization character-ization of Hapgood's editorials is about as unctious a thing as has been contributed to recent controversial contro-versial literature. He says: "The work of Mr. Hapgood in Collier's had interested me. It was a frank attempt to do for the classes what Arthur Brisbane had done for the masses popularize the editorial and while there cmed lacking in Mr. Hapgood's essays any escial distinction of style or originality of view on the contrary, it was an expression of second-class opinion in a well-mannered but quite unimportant way still the ex- ( periment had its value to as earnest a student of periodicals as myself." That is certainly an acrid portrait, but if Mr. Hapgood ever has a biographer, he will probably never be able to give in many volumes half so vivid a picture as has Mr. Lawson of Editor Hapgood's rather superficial superfi-cial intellect and pambyncss of style. |
