That such a school of readers exists is proved by the popularity of F.P.A’s verses and prose.  If any one had told Mark Twain that a man could run a daily newspaper column in New York and amass any degree of fame through translations of the “Odes of Horace” into the vernacular, the veteran humorist would probably have slapped Albert Bigelow Paine on the back and taken the next boat for Bermuda.  And yet in “Something Else Again” we find some sixteen translations of Horace and other “furriners,” exotic phrases such as “eheu fugaces” and “ex parte” used without making faces over them, and a popular exposition of highly technical verse forms which James Russell Lowell and Hal Longfellow would have considered terrifically high-brow.  And yet thousands of American business men quote F.P.A. to thousands of other American business men every morning.

* * * * *

Can it be said that the American people are not so low-brow as they like to pretend?  There is a great deal of affectation in this homespun frame of mind, and many a man makes believe that he doesn’t know things simply because no one has ever written about them in the American Magazine.  If the truth were known, we are all a great deal better educated than we will admit, and the derisive laughter with which we greet signs of culture is sometimes very hollow.  In F.P.A. we find a combination which makes it possible for us to admit our learning and still be held honorable men.  It is a good sign that his following is increasing.

LXIII

BUSINESS LETTERS

A text-book on English composition, giving examples of good and bad letter-writing, is always a mine of possibilities for one given to ruminating and with nothing in particular to do.  In “Business Man’s English” the specimen letters are unusually interesting.  It seems almost as if the authors, Wallace Edgar Bartholomew and Floyd Hurlbut, had selected their examples with a view to their fiction possibilities.  It also seems to the reader as if he were opening someone else’s mail.

For instance, the following is given as a type of “very short letter, well placed”: 

* * * * *

Mr. Richard T. Green,
Employment Department,
Travellers’ Insurance Co.,
Chicago, Ill.

Dear Mr. Green: 

The young man about whom you inquire has much native ability and while in our employ proved himself a master of office routine.

I regret to say, however, that he left us under circumstances that would not justify our recommending him to you.

Cordially yours,

C.S.  THOMPSON

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