that Mr. Garland's Son of the Middle Border is amateurish, flat, banal, and repellant. He gives a condescending coup de pied to the solider works of Arnold Bennett and singles out for intense admiration a scarlet-lattice scene or so in his pot-boilers. As the author of a work on the American language, over-ambitiously designed as a wedge to split asunder the two great English-speaking peoples, and as an advocate of an "intellectual aristocracy," it has suddenly occurred to him that we have been shamefully neglecting the works of George Ade; accordingly, he strongly commmends to our younger generation the works of Mr. George Ade. But the high light and white flame of his appreciation falls upon three objects as follows: the squalid story of an atrocious German bar-maid by Sudermann; an anonymous autobiographical novel, discovered by Mr. Mencken himself, which exhibits "an eternal blue-nose with every wart and pimple glittering," and is "as devoid of literary sophistication as an operation for gallstones"; and, third and last, the works of Mr. Mencken's partner, Mr. George Jean Nathan, with his divine knack at making phrases "to flabbergast a dolt."
I imagine my bewildered seeker for æsthetic liberation asking her mentor if studying these things will help her to form "the diviner mind." "Don't bother me now," exclaims Mr. Mencken; "don't bother me now. I am just striking out a great phrase. Aesthetic effort tones up the mind with a kind of high
