Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better lesson. During a half dozen years he has published more than a half dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the _Anthology_ but which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which makes up a large share of his literary character. There comes to mind the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track. Five of Mr. Masters's later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction. In _Mitch Miller_ he attempted in prose to write a new _Tom Sawyer_ for the Spoon River district; in _Domesday Book_ he applied the method of _The Ring and the Book_ to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood, that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine. The narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods. Its movement is often thick, its wings often gummed and heavy.