[4]

   At all events, I have turned wearily from your book, you bolshevistic German Jew—"

      [4]

    Sævius Nicanor does not record the wonder-working surnames employed to produce this ancient, ante-Aristotlean

     καθαρσις

    , and they are not certainly known. But, quite unaided, I believe, by old Nicanor's hint, Dr. Stuart Pratt Sherman (the accomplished editor of divers contributions to literature, and the author of several books) has discovered, through a series of interesting experiments in vivisection, that the one needful endowment for a critic of American letters is the power to induce within himself "a profound murmur of ancestral voices, and to experience a mysterious inflowing of national experience, in meditating on the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin, and Bradford." Compare "Is There Anything To Be Said for Literary Tradition," in

     The Bookman

    for October, 1920. Any candid consideration of Dr. Sherman's phraseology, here as elsewhere, cannot fail to suggest that he has happily re-discovered the long-lost critical abracadabra of Philistia.

   "But I," says Horvendile feebly, "am not a German Jew."

   "Oh, yes, you are, and so is everybody else whose literary likings are not my likings. I repeat, then, that I have turned wearily from your book. Whether or not it treats of eating, its implication is clearly that the Philistia which has developed Bradford and six other appellations perfectly adapted to produce murmurings and inflowings in properly constituted persons,—and which Philistia, as I have elsewhere asserted, is to-day as always a revolting country whenever it condemns,—has had no civilised cultural atmosphere worth mentioning. So your book fails to connect itself vitally with our great tradition as

   to our literature, and I find nowhere in your book any ascending sun heralded by the lookouts."

   "No more do I," said Horvendile; "but I would have imagined you were more interested in lunar phenomena, and even so—"

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