Reading...and re-Reading....

Mencken's coverage of the Scopes Trial, with its full descriptions of the characters and the setting, is an endless delight, like a Schubert quartet, or a whole series of Schubert quartets, in which the characters and the place-descriptions are, in the manner of Schubert's melodies, endlessly recurrent--and, in  each several strain, hauntingly, morbidly, peculiarly fascinating.  There is an art to it, a fine, over-arching compression and synthesis, but above all there is the constant flickering and glitter of Mencken's diabolical wit, that spares nothing and no one, and which, to the truly deserving, like to William Jennings Bryan (who had, after all, served as Wilson's Secretary of State, and had overseen the American military rape of Haiti), Mencken is almost (but oh how satisfyingly) unbearably cruel.  I had thought that Pope, or possibly Swift, had attained the fullness of savage verbal excoriation, but nothing touches, say, this, of Mencken anent Bryan:

"Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."