But I am forgetting my other candidates--for example, the American university president. I mean, of course, the university president of the new six-cylinder, air-cooled, four-wheel-brake model--half the quack, half the visionary, and wholly the go-getter--the brisk, business-like, confidential, button-holing, regular fellow who harangues Rotary and Kiwanis, extracts millions from usurers by alarming them about Bolshevism, and so builds his colossal pedagogical slaughter-house, with its tens of thousands of students, its professors of cheese-making, investment securities and cheer-leading, its galaxy of football stars, and its general air of Barnum’s circus. Why has this astounding mountebank not got into a book? He fairly yells for loving embalming _à la_ Babbitt. He is not only stupendously picaresque and amusing in himself--the final heir, at once, of Abelard, Cagliostro, Increase Mather, the Fox sisters, Pestalozzi, Dr. Munyon, Godey of the _Ladies’ Book_, and Daniel Drew--; he is also thoroughly and magnificently characteristic of the great land we live in. No other country has ever produced anything quite like him. No other country, I suspect, would tolerate him. But here he lives and flourishes, a superb and perfect American--and yet our novelists all neglect him. Worse and more incredible still, they neglect the most American of all Americans, the very _Ur-Amerikaner_--to wit, the malignant moralist, the Christian turned cannibal, the snouting and preposterous Puritan. Where is there the American novel in which he is even half limned? There are, to be sure, glimpses of him in “The Song of the Lark,” by Willa Cather, and in “Babbitt,” and there is a more elaborate but still incomplete sketch in E. W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country Town.” But Howe, unfortunately, had other fish to fry: he slapped in his bucolic wowser brilliantly, and then passed on to melodrama and the agonies of young love. So, too, with Lewis and Miss Cather. Thus, though the Puritan Father lies embalmed magnificently in the pages of Hawthorne, his heir and assign of the present day, the high-powered uplifter, the prophet of harsh and unenforceable laws, the incurable reformer and nuisance--this sweet fellow yet awaits his anatomist.