To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time.  
Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many of his kind.
 
In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent.
 
My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things, but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great literature.
 
I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love (I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die than dishonour that chosen instrument.
 
I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slipshod and insincere.
&n............