"The simpleton [...] will certainly not have to complain of “gaps entirely devoid of interest”. It will take him all his time to prepare his pleasures and get them in the right order, so that he will not have a moment left to enjoy them."
Engels once married someone as they were dying, a marriage which indeed lasted for a rather brief time and may be adjudged something of a triumph of the ideal over the real. In any case, it would appear that Dühring here has hijacked Engels' own 'polemic' to ridicule Engels. This is merely the shadow of a polemic, one which cannot ascertain that its whole point is not to attack its 'author.'
In general, however, it is a poor polemic that illustrates nothing that Marx has not dealt with far better elsewhere; that continually presumes to have an understanding of a topic where no such understanding is presented or explained. Poor Eugen does not in all this time come to stand for anything particularly notable, in this light it's a descent from the earlier polemics (somehow) to just name-calling accompanied with vague platitudes. It often merely agrees with the 'target' of the polemic, but then says 'but,' as though this word in its hallowed isolation were sufficient to make it 'polemical.'
The whole piece in its manic tone has less the appeal of a Hamlet and more the tone of an illiterate Lizzie Burns' erratic flails before death.
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