Barnum wrote as he talked, grandly, sonorously and wittily, but he is often exceedingly dull. What he never learned was the art of concentrating his material. He was himself Boswell to his own Dr. Johnson, and he wrote with even less critical perspective than the illustrious Scotch _raconteur_. Almost anything that happened to him seemed to him fit for publication, unless it was obscene or self-damaging. When he gave a relative money, it was set down with unction in the current edition of the autobiography. When he bought a sister’s son a farm in Wisconsin, so that the boy might spend the rest of his days in honest toil and healthy happiness, it was set down in the autobiography, with the notation that it is always admirable to help those who will help themselves. Barnum labored under the delusion for the most part of his career, at least so far as his literary expression was concerned, that everything he did was both important and interesting; that is why one quarter of the autobiography is soporific. There is nothing so tiresome for continued reading as a joke book, and Barnum was unsparing in his rambling anecdotes cheap-jack chronicles, and tales of country yokelry. Indiscriminately, promiscuously, without connection or reason, he poured forth jokes on or by his friends and neighbors and himself, in a barber shop, in a church, on his father’s farm, in the Museum, at “Iranistan.” Some of the anecdotes are interesting, and some are revelatory, but even these lose their effect in the jumble of their dreary companions. In the later editions he, or an adviser, had enough judgment to omit some of the extraneous boyhood anecdotes that fill many pages in the first edition, but too many are retained, and after a period with the books the reader must conclude that the charm of many of his stories probably lay in the way he told them rather than in the stories. Barnum as a wag in print was inferior to Barnum as a manipulator of choice pieces of waggery gathered from the ends of the earth, or at least from Bridgeport, Connecticut. “The idea haunts one like a presence,” wrote the editor of the _Christian Review_ concerning the autobiography, “that having sold the public in so many nice tricks, he may have sold it again in explaining how they were done.” This is fair criticism, for while reading Barnum there is always a suspicion that he is not telling the truth even now when he thinks it can be told, a suspicion confirmed often by other men’s books. Whether or not he told the truth, he struck a note that found large sympathy among his contemporaries. The American people were looking for a philosophy of Success, and Barnum combined for them “There’s a sucker born every minute,” with “Honesty is the Best Policy.” These truths, neither imposing in itself, taken together, as Barnum took them, formed the metaphysics of business, whose Aristotle was Barnum.