into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in
the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more
than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral
chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or
flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its
heart and soul.

Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as
a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well
known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier.
Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing
sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done.

The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to
look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship.
The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill
Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially
warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged
from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to
transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his
best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on
an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a
picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_
got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy
race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would
dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_
building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle.

"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like
dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the