’Tis of my country that I would endite, In hope to set some misconceptions right. My country? I love it well, and those good fellows Who, since their wit’s unknown, escape the gallows. But you stuffed coats who’re neither tepid nor distinctly boreal, Pimping, conceited, placid, editorial, Could I but speak as ’twere in the “Restoration” I would articulate your perdamnation. This year perforce I must with circumspection— For Mencken states somewhere, in this connection: “It is a moral nation we infest”. Despite such reins and checks I’ll do my best, An art! You all respect the arts, from that infant tick Who’s now the editor of _The Atlantic_, From Comstock’s self, down to the meanest resident, Till up again, right up, we reach the president, Who shows his taste in his ambassadors: A novelist, a publisher, to pay old scores, A novelist, a publisher and a preacher, That’s sent to Holland, a most particular feature, Henry Van Dyke, who thinks to charm the Muse you pack her in A sort of stinking deliquescent saccharine. The constitution of our land, O Socrates, Was made to incubate such mediocrities, These and a taste in books that’s grown perennial And antedates the Philadelphia centennial. Still I’d respect you more if you could bury Mabie, and Lyman Abbot and George Woodberry, For minds so wholly founded upon quotations Are not the best of pulse for infant nations. Dulness herself, that abject spirit, chortles To see your forty self-baptized immortals, And holds her sides where swelling laughter cracks ’em Before the “Ars Poetica” of Hiram Maxim. All one can say of this refining medium Is “_Zut! Cinque lettres!_” a banished gallic idiom, Their doddering ignorance is waxed so notable ’Tis time that it was capped with something quotable. Here Radway grew, the fruit of pantosocracy, The very fairest flower of their gynocracy. Radway? My hero, for it will be more inspiring If I set forth a bawdy plot like Byron Than if I treat the nation as a whole. Radway grew up. These forces shaped his soul; These, and yet God, and Dr. Parkhurst’s god, the N. Y. Journal (Which pays him more per week than The Supernal). These and another godlet of that day, your day (You feed a hen on grease, perhaps she’ll lay The sterile egg that is still eatable: “Prolific Noyes” with output undefeatable). From these he (Radway) learnt, from provosts and from editors unyielding And innocent of Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant and Fielding. They set their mind (it’s still in that condition)— May we repeat; the Centennial Exposition At Philadelphia, 1876? What it knew then, it knows, and there it sticks. And yet another, a “charming man”, “sweet nature”, but was Gilder, _De mortuis verum_, truly the master builder?