Stevenson read, and confessed to deliberate practice work in imitation of, the masters that preceded him. So we know that Brann read, absorbed, transmuted, and transfigured the style of the classic writers, and added a daring measure of reckless originality. As Brann read his Homer and his Carlyle, his Shakespeare and his Ingersoll, so Hubbard and O. Henry read their Brann; and Hubbard specifically commends him to the would-be writer as Johnson commended Addison. There is no ore that will assay more literary metal to the page than Brann. As a writer's writer no man of our time surpasses him. His vocabulary is conceded, even by his most envious critics, to outrange that of any other American. His gift of figurative speech--that essential that distinguishes literature from mere correct writing--rivals that of any writer in any country, language or time. Brann's compass of words, idioms and phrases harks back to the archaic and reaches forward to the futuristic. If you wish merely to learn to appreciate literature so that you may nod approval in polite society when an accredited writer's name is mentioned, go to college and listen to the lectures of literary Ph. D.'s. But if you want to learn to write, take your Bible, your Shakespeare and your Brann and hie you to your garret, there to read, reread, study, memorize, and imitate if you can. And God be praised if you can steal the best and to it add somewhat of your own. Brann offends, shocks and outrages, is suppressed, damned, forcibly ignored and laboriously forgotten, because though the lark sings in his words, "the buzzard is on the wing." But Brann did not make the stench that offends the nostrils of the nice; he only stirred up the cesspools to let us know that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for their abatement. That riles the kept keepers of lesser fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty that the few may live in perfumed palaces. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, shouted Brann and died shouting, while the well-fed and fatted sat on the lid to keep it down. But we who have lived to see the lid blown off Russia and feel the growl and grumble of the bowels of all the earth need not overstrain our ears to hear Brann laughing now in that good Baptist Hell to which a bullet in the back gave him the passport. POTIPHAR'S WIFE. STORY OF JOSEPH REVISITED