Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried. This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is, therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in our universities are those which concern themselves with written and spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools and colleges is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.