Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;
Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!

But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he
sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the
slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is
a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from
Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious
inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his
brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real
earnestness that underlies his chaff.

I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the
hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a
submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by
Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in
his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of
letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some
contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but
nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six
times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret
compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:

MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)

TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea.
(COLD ROAST BEEF.)

WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF
STEW.)

THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)

FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of
Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued,
sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main
business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR
CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)

SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself
for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.)

SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we
have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.

But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always
tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry
battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real
voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione,