Not all American literary sylists liked Henry Adams

[Paul Mackin]

Tucked in the pages of an old book, I came across a 1930 Nation magazine
review of James Truslow Adams' (no relation) _The Adams Family_ under the
byline of H. L. Menken. 

About Henry Adams's two important books Menken says:

". . . that there is anything more in them than a somewhat drug-storish
sentimentality I have often doubted. The first [Education] made a splash
because it was recognized as a furious criticism of the whole American
scheme of things, and anything of the sort, coming from an Adams, was
important news, but its fury was not accompanied by anything properly
describable as penetration, and today, reread, the book has an
indubitably shallow and even sophomoric smack. It might have been written,
given sufficient skill at English, by one of the new humanists.
  
"Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres" is quite as unsatisfactory. It is an
evocation of the Middle Ages by a man who had but lately discovered them,
and whose understanding of them remained defective to the end . . . "

		P.