Letters From Father Byrd

TO VIRGINIANS:

Dear Folks, — The fame of Matthew Fontaine Maury is even more secure than his tens of millions of admirers ever dared hope. This statement is based upon a bit of information we have just gleaned from an esteemed metropolitan newspaper. Heywood Broun, super-critic of the New York World, has discovered that Matthew Fontaine Maury once lived!

Mr. Broun was discussing very learnedly, as is his wont, the recent election for the Hall of Fame. The men and women voting on this occasion achieved what seemed to him a ridiculous result. “Walt Whitman,” he remarked, “was ninth in the list and will not, at the present time, be admitted. Matthew Fontaine Maury and Benjamin Rush (to my shame I must confess I never heard of either) were both preferred before the good gray poet. To me this is Inexplicable.”

We are not surprised at Mr. Broun’s state of mind. We do not even blush for shame

at the thought of a fellow worker’s remarkable admission of ignorance. We are thinking of the fame which belongs to the great “Pathfinder of the Seas.” It is so much better for it that his fame is not being fingered and mouthed by one of those self esteemed and irresponsible persons who know themselves as super-critics. Real, every-day, honest-to-goodness folks will appreciate it and cherish it more for that reason.

We recall that Mr. Broun attended as a super-critic the National Democratic convention in Madison Square Garden. The learned man took occasion to comment caustically on the keynote speech of Pat Harrison, of Mississippi. Pat, who, in the eyes of the Sage of New York, combines in himself all that is demagogic and Babbittie, essayed to quote Byron in his call to the Democratic hosts. Broun was surprised. He did not know that In all Mississippi there lived a man who had ever heard of the English poet. The super-critic of everything, from baseball to philosophical thought, 500n was introduced by a dozen newspapers to John Sharp Williams, former United States Senator, compared with whom Henry Cabot Lodge still was an aspiring student and nothing more.

It was then, perhaps, that Broun learned Mississippi had sent Senators to Washington prior to the time of Pat Harrison.

Personally, we should like to think Broun really never heard of Matthew Fontaine Maury. To gloat over him as a perfect ignoramus would be so nice.

However, our mind refuses to accept as true the case he has attempted to make out against himself. We believe he deliberately misstated fact when he said he had never heard of the “Pathfinder of the Seas.” We believe also that he possessed a good working knowledge of John Sharp Williams’ career. The great trouble is that Maury was a Virginian and Williams is a Mississippian. Neither of them ever resided in Brooklyn or attended Harvard Broun, despite all his pretensions, is among the narrowest of provincials. Virginia and Mississippi are still located In a dark region south of an Imaginary line separating that region from the United States.

Just think what a calamity it would have been for “Babe” Ruth to have been born in Virginia! He would never have received the reams of favorable publicity given him in Broun’s column when the rest of the country was throwing verbal rocks at the

King of Swat. Broun, the man who never heard of Matthew Fontaine Maury, probably saved Ruth to baseball.

FATHER BYRD.