King's Canary Chirps

U.S editors well remember a classic headline of 1924:

KING'S CANARY HERE BUT WON'T CHIRP*

Probably Great Britain's remote and scholarish 84-year-old Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, does not yet know that the grand old headline was an allusion to the fact that he, Poet Bridges, has never been very prolific in either speech or rhyme. Last week precise Dr. Bridges made his first public appearance in many a year. Rising up like a hoary ghost at Magdalen College, Oxford, he lectured briefly on Poetry. The circumstances were such that any editor who had a mind to might have ordered out the screamer: KING'S CANARY CHIRPS ON RADIO

As the first Poet Laureate ever to address a microphone. Dr. Bridges chose to engage in an imaginary dialogue between himself and the late famed Hellenic philosopher Plato (427-347 B. C.). Before long the conversation turned upon Beauty, and Dr. Bridges said to Plato and to the Ladies & Gentlemen of the Radio Audience:

"What a child needs most is spiritual education, which can be given through the child's sensibility to beauty and his desire to mimic it. Preferential imitation of right conduct is a habit of virtue. There is nothing in all education of more intrinsic need than education in beauty."

*0ccasion: Poet Bridge's arrival in the U. S. to lecture at the University of Michigan.

Author: Frank O'Connell, wisecracker of the New York Morning Telegraph. Mr. O'Connell lately died in a Turkish bath.