Books in Brief: The Letters of Mercurius

The Letters of Mercurius, (Harvard, 106 pp., $4). It is perhaps doubly revealing that letters of social commentary which appeared in England in the Spectator should in this country appear under the aegis of a university press. Granted that they deal in great part with the current blight on the groves of academe—a proper subject for a university press, to be sure—it is nonetheless worthy of note that the English tradition of humane letters which makes it possible for mock seventeenth-century epistles (recounting the actions of the “fanatiques”) to appear in a national magazine, does not obtain here, and worthy of note also that our commercial publishers prefer accentuating the new and rebellious to defending the old and proper. Yet the tradition ought to be one of our chief guards against the “fanatiques,” and it is much to be regretted that defense of propriety is not deemed to be commercially viable. As done here by the pseudonymous Mercurius it is, however, good fun as well as good sense—all the better because, in the late C. S. Lewis’ phrase, the author, in making his points, treads not in brogans but in slippers.

JL

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J. C. Lobdell

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The Letters of Mercurius, (Harvard, 106 pp., $4). It is perhaps doubly revealing that letters of social commentary which appeared in England in the Spectator should in this country appear under the aegis of a university press. Granted that they deal in great part with the current blight on the groves of academe—a proper subject for a university press, to be sure—it is nonetheless worthy of note that the English tradition of humane letters which makes it possible for mock seventeenth-century epistles (recounting the actions of the “fanatiques”) to appear in a national magazine, does not obtain here, and worthy of note also that our commercial publishers prefer accentuating the new and rebellious to defending the old and proper. Yet the tradition ought to be one of our chief guards against the “fanatiques,” and it is much to be regretted that defense of propriety is not deemed to be commercially viable. As done here by the pseudonymous Mercurius it is, however, good fun as well as good sense—all the better because, in the late C. S. Lewis’ phrase, the author, in making his points, treads not in brogans but in slippers.