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--"