Chapter VIII

Perhaps the most important piece of literature from a local pen is Professor William M. Sloane's "Life of Napoleon." This is a painstaking and authoritative record of the great Frenchman who conquered everybody but himself. Dr. William J. Holland, once chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, now director of the Carnegie Museum, has given to the field of popular science "The Butterfly Book"--an author who knows every butterfly by its Christian name. Then Andrew Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy" presents masses of statistics with such lightness of touch as to make them seem a stirring narrative. His other books, "An American Four-in-Hand in Britain" and "Round the World" present the vivid impressions of a keen traveler. His "Life of James Watt" conveys a sympathetic portraiture of the inventor of the steam engine. His "Gospel of Wealth" is a piece of deep-thinking discursiveness, although it really seems a superfluous thesis, for Mr. Carnegie's best exposition of the gospel of wealth unfolds itself in two thousand noble buildings erected all over the world for the diffusion of literature; in those splendid conceptions, the Scottish Education Fund; the Washington Carnegie Institution for Scientific Research; the Pension for College Professors, which has so much advanced the dignity and security of teaching; the Pension for Aged and Disabled Workmen; the Hero Fund, with its provision of aid to the injured and to the worthy poor; the many college endowments; and, greater than all, the Peace Palace at The Hague, through which he will make his appeal to the conscience of civilization during all time to organize and extend among the nations of the earth that system of arbitrated justice which has been already established within the borders of each State.

But if I continue to group our Pittsburgh authors in this arbitrary fashion, those who come at the end will think I mean the last to be least. Therefore, let me pursue the theme indiscriminately, as I meant to do all along had not that same Pegasus, in spite of my defiance, run away at the very start.