I found the Britton outburst delightful. Others, of course, will not. Underpinning the humor is a notion I've come more and more to share recently. I'll risk annoying many of you by trying to state it: In the old days, the literary scholar tacitly viewed him or her self as a curator, in the sense that a curator deems himself less important than the masterpieces he displays and passes on. But in recent decades (perhaps starting with the New Criticism on which I doted in undergraduate days), I see the critic increasingly thrusting himself into the foreground. Now he seems less a curator than, say, an expert on fossils--tacitly assuming himself to be an infintely more enthralling creature than whatever remnants he analyzes. I'm cynical and (yes) antique enough to find it all both amusing and pitiful. I do NOT believe that the typical product of graduate school is as bright or perceptive as Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. As for creativity and imagination, the contrast is ludicrous. Whatever sparks she or he may have been born with were rigorously doused by years of proseminars and seminars. Amid all the jargon, ponderousness and elaborate "cleverness" of recent criticism I see far too much of the kind of posturing that leads children to say of each other, "She thinks she's SO smart!" I believe I also see plain old envy--an envy so buried that it no longer even recognizes itself. It's the envy of the tenure-and-promotion- driven plodder who needs desperately, desperately! to prove that men and women of genius--Dickens, Austen, Twain, Cather, Faulkner, even Shakespeare--were creatures of lesser intellect and more limited consciousness than his dreary self. Mark Coburn