d whet the appetite. Probably the
best example is "The Delicious Vice" to which reference has just been made.
This title was more or less an evolution from an address delivered before
the Western Writers Association "On the Vice of Novel Reading" that started
a discussion lasting through one whole day. Allison is a warm champion of
The Novel as an institution, and as well an avowed and confirmed reader of
novels, which he declares are poetry in essence, lacking only the form and
rhyme but having measure, the accent and the figures of the whole range of
poetry. He says that in all literature--

The great muse of History ranks first in dignity, power and
usefulness; but who will say that at her court the Prime Minister
is not the Novel which by its lightness, grace and address has
popularized history all over the world?

At that time the word "microbe" and the theory of its significance was in
the full swell of popular use. Allison took it to illustrate the essence of
spiritual intellectuality struggling against the swarming bacteria of
animalism that made up the rest of the human body controlled by the brain.
He pointed out that the difference between types of brains was two ounces
of grayish pulp, almost wholly absent in the unthinking herd of men. But it
enlarged in gradually lessening groups of men to the intellectual few that
dominate thought, thus:

The microbe that might have become glorious ounces of brain has
been content at first to become merely a little wart of pulp, which
finds expression in skill and quickness and more of coveted
leisure. There is the next higher terrace and another and another,
until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and
symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the
purest intellects are elevated to an ever increasing height in ever
decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling
base below they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude
of incarnate genius burning like suns with their own essence. It is
so far up that the eyes deceive and men dispute who it is that
stands at the top, but, whoever he may be, he has carried by the
force of strength, determination and patient will, the whole swarm
of his evil bacteria with him. They swarm through every terrace
below, increasing in force as the pyramid enlarges downward. It is
the pyramidal bulk of human na