Page:Americans (1922).djvu/340

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"You had better give it," he said, "the full measure of damnation." Mr. More, as all contributors and authors know, sustained the great tradition.

An inheritor of the high mission of damnation does not fluently mix with the various literary adulation societies of the metropolis. To a man of Mr. More's internal preoccupations the great city offers in vain that life which impresses the eye of a Maupassant from Texas as so rich and various. Her highway pageantry, her chirping slopes of Helicon, her "colorful" coast of Bohemia, her swarming literary proletariat, leave him as cold as Nineveh and Babylon. And so Mr. More does not conceal from us that he is happier since he left New York. There are more days in a Princeton week. There is more leisure in a Princeton chair. A man of immense intellectual possessions, he has from the outset manifested a marked predilection for literary society in the grand style; to have much of which, one must choose one's avenue and residence. I conceive the Shelburne essays, to which he adds a wing year after year, as a many-chambered mansion, conspicuously withdrawn from the public highway, built and maintained for the reception of Indian sages, Greek philosophers, great poets, moralists, scholars, statesmen, and other guests from the Elysian Fields, who, but for his lordly pleasure-house, would be hard put to it for a resting place when, of a week-end, they revisit the glimpses of the moon. Let us be thankful—we