Jobation

AN ANTHOLOGY OF INVECTIVE AND ABUSE--Hugh Kingsmill--Dial ($2.50). Anthologist Kingsmill had a good idea when he thought of this book. Although perhaps the most effective invective, the most useful abuse, will never see print, a good deal has been published since Caxton started his press. Anthologist Kingsmill had a big crop to pick from; some of them were daisies.

Dr. Sam Johnson's famed letters to Lord Chesterfield, to Faker James MacPherson, are printed entire; also his observation that Chesterfield's Letters "teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master." Says Blackwood's Magazine of Poet John Keats' Endymion: "calm, settled, imperturbable driveling idiocy." Gentle Poet Swinburne thus describes Ralph Waldo Emerson to his face: "a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on. . . ." Says our own Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain): "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." And from the famed nursery tale, Gulliver's Travels, by Dean Jonathan Swift: "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives [mankind] to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

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