The simple truth, of course, is that the standards and traditions these sublimated Prohibition enforcement officers argue for so eloquently have no actual existence in the first-line literature of the American people--that what they demand is not a lofty fidelity to a genuine ideal, but only an artificial and absurd subservience to notions that were regarded with contempt by every American of the civilized minority even when they prevailed. In other words, what they argue for is not a tradition that would take in Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and Mark Twain, but a tradition that would pass over all these men to embrace Cooper, Bryant, Donald G. Mitchell, N. P. Willis, J. G. Holland, Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Even Longfellow, I daresay, must be left out, for didn’t he drink of green and terrible waters in Paris as a youth and didn’t Poe accuse him of stealing from the Spanish and the German? Certainly even Longfellow, to go back to Doughty’s interdict, “simmered in the devil’s cauldron of central Europe” and was “spewed out of Italy and France.” Could Bryant himself qualify? Didn’t he trifle with strange tongues and admire enemy aliens? And what of Lowell? His Dante studies surely had a sinister smack; one can’t imagine a Texas Grand Goblin approving them. Bayard Taylor I refrain from mentioning at all. His translation of “Faust” came to a just judgment at last when it was hurled from the shelves of every American university patronized by the issue of 100 per cent. Americans. Its incineration on a hundred far-flung campuses, indeed, was the second great patriotic event of the _annus mirabilis_ which saw the launching of Brownell’s “Standards” and the entrance of the Ku Klux Klan into literary criticism.