f the exiled Eugenie
to conduct a periodical against her enemies, who purposed to make her
refuge in England untenable by means of newspaper attacks. It is easy
to imagine the zest with which the chivalrous Bierce plunged into
preparations for the fight. But the struggle never came; it was
sufficient to learn that Bierce would be the Richmond; the attack upon
the stricken ex-empress was abandoned.

When he was urged in San Francisco, years afterward, to write more of
the inimitable things that filled those two volumes, he said that it was
only fun, a boy's work. Only fun! There has never been such delicious
fun since the beginning of literature, and there is nothing better than
fun. Yet it held his own peculiar quality, which is not that of American
fun,--quality of a brilliant intellectuality: the keenness of a rapier,
a teasing subtlety, a contempt for pharisaism and squeamishness, and
above all a fine philosophy. While he has never lost his sense of the
whimsical, the grotesque, the unusual, he--unfortunately, perhaps--came
oftener to give it the form of pure wit rather than of cajoling humor.
Few Americans know him as a humorist, because his humor is not built
on the broad, rough lines that are typically American. It belongs to an
older civilization, yet it is jollier than the English and bolder than
the French.

At all times his incomparable wit and satire has appealed rather to the
cultured, and even the emotional quality of his fiction is frequently so
profound and unusual as to be fully enjoyed only by the intellectually
untrammelled. His writing was never for those who could only read and
feel, not think.

Another factor against his wider acceptance has been the infrequency and
fragmentary character of his work, particularly his satire. No sustained
fort in that field has come from him. His satire was born largely of
a transient stimulus, and was evanescent. Even his short stories are,
generally, but blinding flashes of a moment in a life. He laughingly
ascribes the meagerness of his output to indolence; but there may be a
deeper reason, of which he is unconscious. What is more dampening than
a seeming lack of appreciation? "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians" had
a disheartening search for an established publisher, and finally was
brought out by an admiring merchant of San Francisco. It attracted so
much critical attention that its re-publication was soon undertaken by a
regular house.

Had Bierce never prod