A few years ago a young college professor, eager to make a name for himself, brought out a laborious “critical” edition of “Sam Slick,” by Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, eighty-seven years after its first publication. It turned out to be quite unreadable--a dreadful series of archaic jocosities about varieties of _Homo americanus_ long perished and forgotten, in a dialect now intelligible only to paleophilologists. Sometimes I have a fear that the same fate awaits Ring Lardner. The professors of his own day, of course, are quite unaware of him, save perhaps as a low zany to be enjoyed behind the door. They would no more venture to whoop him up publicly and officially than their predecessors of 1880 would have ventured to whoop up Mark Twain, or their remoter predecessors of 1837 would have dared to say anything for Haliburton. In such matters the academic mind, being chiefly animated by a fear of sneers, works very slowly. So slowly, indeed, does it work that it usually works too late. By the time Mark Twain got into the text-books for sophomores two-thirds of his compositions, as the Young Intellectuals say, had already begun to date; by the time Haliburton was served up as a sandwich between introduction and notes he was already dead. As I say, I suspect sadly that Lardner is doomed to go the same route. His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and amusing; no other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better. But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass, that Lardner’s Low Down Americans--his incomparable baseball players, pugs, song-writers, Elks, small-town Rotarians and golf caddies--are flitting figures of a transient civilization and doomed to be as puzzling and soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton’s Yankee clock peddler is to-day.