the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon had "ended miserably: Castlereagh cut his own throat, Louis XVIII rotted upon his throne and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen." Heine told me that "to Goethe the Cross was as hateful as bugs, tobacco and garlic," and I understand why. Heine had spoken of the Virgin Mary as "the fair dame du comptoir of the Catholic Church, whose customers, especially the barbarians of the North, were attracted and spellbound by her heavenly smile." Heine told me that religion, by inculcating a houndlike humility, the rejection of all earthly goods and the renunciation of innocent pleasures, had "really brought sin and hypocrisy into the world." And I was not wounded by any of these things, because I felt myself to be, in my ethical and religious inheritance and in my sentiment for the history and poetry of the Chosen People, almost as much of a Jew as Heine, and because I was in the same boat with him, voyaging on the open sea of the modern spirit.
There is an obvious parallelism between the present line of Mr. Mencken's effort and the line of Heine, and it has set me to thinking over some of the reasons why when the later iconoclast began his critical jehad he did not bewitch and enchant me as Heine had done.
The first of these reasons Mr. Mencken himself has just given me by stating that he is a white, blond, Protestant Nordic and an excessively pure type of the Anglo-Saxon. I am no sworn lover of the Anglo-Saxon. Though I have occasionally quoted Mr. Dreiser's theorizings on the intolerable moral idealism of the "Anglo-Saxons," though, on due and sufficient provocation, I have twitted various persons for raising Semitic, Celtic and German banners against the Re-
