the epic have lain down together
and wallowed in the same Parnassan pool. The censers that have swung
continually in the temple of the muses have been replenished with
lard oil, and to our grateful olfactories has the joyous Lake breezes
wafted the refreshing odors of sonnets and of slaughter pens
commingled.

But how long is this sort of thing going to last? It surely cannot be
the millennium. These twin giants will some day--alas, too
soon--learn their powers and be greedy to test them against one
another. A fatal jealousy seems to be inevitable; it may be fended
off, but how?

The world's fair will be likely to precipitate a conflict between the
interests of which we speak. Each interest is already claiming
precedence, and we hear with alarm that less than a week ago one of
our most respected packers threatened to withdraw his support of the
international copyright bill unless the Chicago Literary Society
united in an indorsement of his sugar-cured hams.

When we think of the horrors that will attend and follow a set-to
between Chicago trade and Chicago literature, we are prone to cry
out, in the words of the immortal Moore--not Tom--but Mrs. Julia A.,
of Michigan:

_An awful tremor quakes the soul!
And makes the heart to quiver,
While up and down the spine doth roll
A melancholy shiver._

In December, 1895, Edmund Clarence Stedman contributed to the "Souvenir
Book" of the New York Hebrew Fair a charmingly appreciative, yet justly
critical, tribute to Eugene Field, whom he likened to Shakespeare's
Yorick, whose "motley covered the sweetest nature and tenderest heart."
Mr. Stedman there speaks of Field as a "complex American with the
obstreperous _bizarrerie_ of the frontier and the artistic delicacy of
our oldest culture always at odds within him--but he was above all a
child of nature, a frolic incarnate, and just as he would have been in
any time or country." He also tells how Field put their friendship to
one of those tests which sooner or later he applied to all--the test of
linking their names with something utterly ludicrous and impossible,
but published with all the solemn earmarks of verity. It was on the
occasion of Mr. Stedman's visit to Chicago on its invitation to lecture
before the Twentieth Century Club. This gave Field the cue to announce
the coming event in a way to fill the visitor with consternation. About
two weeks before the poet-