has been overlooked by many who have delighted to honor Holliday as an
essayist. But it is vastly worth reading. It is a brilliant study, full
of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it
merrily in the face of those who are frequently crapehanging and dirging
that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C.
Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic
been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was
appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr.
Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire,
also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical commonwealth of Indiana. Mr.
Holliday traces with a good deal of humor and circumstance the various
ways in which the gods gave Mr. Tarkington just the right kind of
ancestry, upbringing, boyhood and college career to produce a talented
writer. But the fates that catered to Tarkington with such generous hand
never dealt him a better run of cards than when Holliday wrote this
book.

The study is one of surpassing interest, not merely as a service to
native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow
through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that
he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so
deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself
within Tarkington's dashing checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement
of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter
were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I
think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very
plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A
dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored
perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine
coast and a few twanging chords from the Princeton Glee Club.

Fourth Memo--Mr. Holliday is critic as well as essayist.

CHAPTER VI

(OUR HERO FINDS A STEADY JOB)

It was the summer of 1917 when Owd Bob came back to New York. Just at
that juncture I happened to hear that a certain publisher needed an
editorial man, and when Bob and I were at Browne's discussing the fate
of "Walking-Stick Papers" over a jug of shandygaff, I told him this
news. He hurried to the office in question through a drenching
rain-gust, and has been there ever since. The pub