23 
PHOTOGRAPHIC SECTION. 
In spite of past and present time difficulties the Committee endeavoured 
to maintain the activities of the Section, until the conclusion of peace brings 
happier times, with increased opportunities for Nature Photography. Three 
Lectures were given by eminently qualified Lecturers. 
On Thursday, November 21st, an excellent Lecture was given by Mr. 
F. H. Crossley, entitled ‘‘ Medizeval Stallwork in Lancashire,” with one 
hundred lantern slides taken by Mr. Crossley himself. 
On Thursday, February 13th, the Lecture was given by Mr. G. E. Thompson, 
F.R.P.S., of Liverpool, unon ‘“‘ The North Italian Lakes,” illustrated by a 
long series of his own lantern slides. 
On Thursday, March 27th, Mr, F. H. Crossley gave a most interesting 
Lecture on ‘‘ The Architectural Development of English Gothic Monuments.” 
All the Lectures were very well attended and greatly appreciated. 
The Photographic Section has also had two practice demonstrations in 
the dark room. One by Mr. Francis Darling on the ‘“‘ Retouching of Negatives,” 
and one by Mr. D. B. Jones on the ‘‘ Development of Plates and Films and 
Printing with Gaslight Papers.’’ These demonstrations proved very helpful 
and instructive to the Members. 
LITERATURE SECTION. 
The work of the Section began with a Lecture delivered by the Chairman, 
Mr. J. Menteith Graham, under the title of ‘‘ Rhymeless Poetry.”’ The poems 
of the Bible first came under attention, and the song of triumph in the 15th 
Chapter of Exodus was held to show that Moses, among the magnificent 
accomplishments which he had acauired in the centre of civilization, Egypt. 
and which had fitted him for the career of lawgiver, statesman, founder of 
the religion of his countrymen, was also the earliest of Hebrew poets. In 
dealing with the Book of Job, Mr. Graham seemed inclined to suggest an 
Arabic origin for what is incomparably the loftiest poetic drama in the 
literature of Israel; and from this work, as well as from the psalm-songs of 
David and the Book of Isaiah, passages were quoted in illustration of the 
grandeur of Hebrew poetry. In turning from Syria to Greece, the Lecturer 
gave inevitable precedence to the first of warrior epics, the Iliad, and to a 
further effort inseparably associated with the name of Homer—that most 
fascinating of all poetic romances, the Odyssey. Next to be seriously noticed 
were the unhappily few relics of the genius of Sappho, the copies of whose 
collected nine books were burned to ashes in 1086 of the Christian era; and 
this immortal woman was deliberately held by Mr. Graham to be unsurpassed 
in the world’s entire wealth of poetry. There followed brief analyses of the 
unapproachable tragedies of schylus, the artistically absorbing masterworks 
of Sovhocles, the efforts—perhaps not too vrofanely described as in the nature 
of brilliant melodrama—of Euriphides. Consideration was then directed te 
the chief names of Rome, and here the point was emphasized that the great 
poetic figures thus far introduced were uniformly identified with rhymeless 
utterance. In diversification of the subject, the rhymed achievements of Italy, 
Spain, Portugal, and France were duly touched upon. Then Mr. Graham returned 
to his main theme by concentrating attention on the master spirits of English 
blank verse. In exemplification of the dignity and harmony of this method of 
- literary ‘expression, the Lecturer gave extracts in turn from Marlowe, Shake- 
speare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Swin- 
-burne. It was incidentally observed that these great men were equally skilled 
in the use of rhymed and unrhymed poetry. But, in the building up of blank 
verse, their care, as in the instances of their mighty predecessors of Israel, 
Greece, and Rome, was unswervingly confined to the artistic adjuncts of true 
harmony, in the essential divisions of quantity, accent, rhythm. The trained 
student of English poetry, from Marlowe and Shakespeare onward, cannot 
