critic was expected, Field's column contained
the following innocent paragraph:

Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, and the foremost of American
critics, is about to visit Chicago. He comes as the guest of the
Twentieth Century Club, and on the evening of Tuesday, the 28th
inst., he will deliver before that discriminating body an address
upon the subject of "Poetry," this address being one of the notable
series which Mr. Stedman prepared for and read before the
undergraduates of Johns Hopkins University last winter. These
discourses are, as we judge from epitomes published in the New York
Tribune, marvels of scholarship and of criticism.

Twenty years have elapsed, as we understand, since Mr. Stedman last
visited Chicago. He will find amazing changes, all in the nature of
improvements. He will be delighted with the beauty of our city and
with the appreciation, the intelligence, and the culture of our
society. But what should and will please him most will be the
cordiality of that reception which Chicago will give him, and the
enthusiasm with which she will entertain this charming prince of
American letters, this eminent poet, this mighty good fellow!

I doubt if Mr. Stedman ever saw this item, which Field merely
inserted, as was his wont, as a prelude to the whimsical announcement
which followed in two days, and which was eagerly copied in the New
York papers in time to make Mr. Stedman cast about for some excuse for
being somewhere else than in Chicago on the 29th of April, 1891. This
second notice is too good an instance of the liberty Field took with
the name of a friend in his delectable vocation of laying "the knotted
lash of sarcasm" about the shoulders of wealth and fashion of Chicago,
not to be quoted in full. It was given with all the precision of
typographical arrangement that is considered proper in printing a
veritable programme of some public procession, in the following terms:

Chicago literary circles are all agog over the prospective visit of
Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, the eminent poet-critic. At the regular
monthly conclave of the Robert Browning Benevolent and Patriotical
Association of Cook County, night before last, it was resolved to
invite Mr. Stedman to a grand complimentary banquet at the Kinsley's
on Wednesday evening, the 29th. Prof. William Morton Payne, grand
marshal of the parade which is to conduct the famous guest from the
railway