Western Verse" and
"Profitable Tales" in high-priced limited editions, with broad margins
of paper that moths and rust do not corrupt, but which tempts
bibliomaniacs to break through and steal.

For my own part, I would select Yorick as the very forecast, in
imaginative literature, of our various Eugene. Surely Shakespeare
conceived the "mad rogue" of Elsinore as made up of grave and gay, of
wit and gentleness, and not as a mere clown or "jig maker." It is true
that when Field put on his cap and bells, he too was "wont to set the
table on a roar," as the feasters at a hundred tables, from "Casey's
Table d'Hote" to the banquets of the opulent East, now rise to testify.
But Shakespeare plainly reveals, concerning Yorick, that mirth was not
his sole attribute,--that his motley covered the sweetest nature and
the tenderest heart. It could be no otherwise with one who loved and
comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does
Hamlet say?--"He hath borne me upon his back a thousand times . . .
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft!" Of what
is he thinking but of his boyhood, before doubts and contemplation
wrapped him in the shadow, and when in his young grief or frolic the
gentle Yorick, with his jest, his "excellent fancy," and his songs and
gambols, was his comrade?

Of all moderns, then, here or in the old world, Eugene Field seems to
be most like the survival, or revival, of the ideal jester of knightly
times; as if Yorick himself were incarnated, or as if a superior bearer
of the bauble at the court of Italy, or of France, or of English King
Hal, had come to life again--as much out of time as Twain's Yankee at
the Court of Arthur; but not out of place,--for he fitted himself as
aptly to his folk and region as Puck to the fays and mortals of a wood
near Athens. In the days of divine sovereignty, the jester, we see,
was by all odds the wise man of the palace; the real fools were those
he made his butt--the foppish pages, the obsequious courtiers, the
swaggering guardsmen, the insolent nobles, and not seldom majesty
itself. And thus it is that painters and romancers have loved to draw
him. Who would not rather be Yorick than Osric, or Touchstone than Le
Beau, or even poor Bertuccio than one of his brutal mockers? Was not
the redoubtable Chicot, with his sword and brains, the true ruler of
France? To come to the jesters of history--which is so much less real
than fiction--wh