and ends of the recitations from the standard
speaker of his elocutionary youth, but no solids either of Greek or
Latin lore and not a trace of his beloved Horace.

Now it so happened that all I had ever learned in school or college of
Greek and Latin had slid from me as easily as running water over a
smooth stone, leaving me as innocent of the classics in the original as
Field. But, unlike Field, when our fortunes threw us together, I had
kept up a close and continuous reading and study of English language
and literature. The early English period had always interested me, and
we had not been together for two months before Field was inoculated
with a ravenous taste for the English literature of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its
simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to
escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur
and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical
versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and
perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's
"History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the
delight of his poetic soul and the text-book for his conversation and
letters, and its effect was traceable in almost every line of his
newspaper work. Knights, damosells, paynims, quests, jousts, and
tourneys, went "rasing and trasing" through his manuscript, until some
people thought he was possessed with an archaic humor from which he
would never recover.

But Sir Thomas Mallory was not his only diet at this time. He
discovered that the old-book corner of A.C. McClurg & Co.'s book-store
was a veritable mine of old British ballads, and he began sipping at
that spring which in a few years was to exercise such a potent
influence on his own verse. It was from this source that he learned the
power of simple words and thoughts, when wedded to rhyme, to reach the
human heart. His "Little Book of Western Verse" would never have
possessed its popular charm had not its author taken his cue from the
"Grand Old Masters." He caught his inspiration and faultless touch from
studying the construction and the purpose of the early ballads and
songs, illustrative of the history, traditions, and customs of the
knights and peasantry of England. Where others were content to judge of
these in such famous specimens as "Chevy Chase" and "The Nut