Bierce’s verses were shafts of satire aimed at the social kites and buzzards of his time. They have a quality of personal ferocity seldom equalled in the world’s literature. There are two volumes of them, “Black Beetles in Amber” and “Shapes of Clay.” Readers of “The Brass Check” may remember a sample there quoted, dealing with Mike de Young, publisher of the San Francisco “Chronicle,” and concluding: A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues-- A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs! Here, as in so much of Bierce’s work, his ignorance of social forces rendered him impotent. He writes about individual scoundrels, but he does not understand what makes them, nor how to remedy them; so his writing is useless to himself, to his victims, and to us. Once upon a time Ambrose Bierce went to sleep at night on a flat stone in a graveyard. We are not told whether his exploits as “an eminent tankard-man” had anything to do with this, but we are told that as a result he became a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism and asthma. So his old age was bitter, and he found insufficient consolation in producing literary masterpieces for a hypothetical posterity. He wandered off into Mexico and disappeared. “To be a gringo in Mexico at the present time is a cheap form of euthanasia,” he told his friends. So apparently it proved; and so this book has another vindication, provided by a leading opponent. “Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him after all.” “He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable character in fiction.’” Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name right!” Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: ‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the “Gazette”.’” CHAPTER CIII THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.