ESSAYS AND CRITICISM.
One of the most deadly weapons in -the armoury of criticism, whether of the politics you ignore, the literature you despise, or the ideals of people you dislike, is ridicule ; but it is commonly enough a specialist's weapon, the only shaft in the quiver, the only shot in your locker, and its discharge generally leaves friend and foe in a harlequinade of disaster with no other resource but to make faces at each other. Mr. Mencken seems to be a man who is never moved to write until he has_got something to object to, but although the only sanction for abuse is that it shall declare its courage and its fidelity by alternative courses, and Mr. Mencken seldom obtains this sanction, he has genius enough to delight you even when he fails to convince. He is magnificently objurgatory, and has no indifference, the chief objective of his epipastie discourses being the land of America, all its members and institutions from "the old lady in Wahoo, Neb., who has read the Bible 38 times" to congressional activity, collegiate graft, and car-conducting : he fetches it -all a fearful clout across the coffer dam with a slap-stick." Strangely enough the idea of America is the one thing Mr. Mencken indubitably loves, loves with passion, with slander, with commination and jibe, but never with tenderness he is like a sadist desiring only to wound and kill the thing he loves. There is a traceable fondness for a few other things—algebra, the works of James Humeker, the binomial theorem—but it does not really matter what he is about : let him talk on in that headlong, witty, enthusiastic way, he is ever the staunch friend ; though he is perhaps less wise than interesting, and more luminous than logical, when he declares : "There are no mute inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of the poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton."
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