orite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to
magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a
two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little
or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life--those minor sympathies
that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of
life--of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his
life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in
his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions,
wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil
of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within
the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and
through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He
associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and
wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he
became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and
griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.

"In wit a man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or
pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack
Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances,
alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how
to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He
scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent
was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to
support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and
reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very
outset of his career.

If he set "no store by genius," he at least had that faith in his own
ability which "compels the elements and wrings a human music from the
indifferent air." From the time he applied himself to the ill-requited
work of journalism he never wavered or turned aside in his purpose to
make it the ladder to literary recognition. He was over thirty before
he realized that in three universities he had slighted the opportunity
to acquire a thorough equipment for literary work. But he was
undismayed, for did he not read in his beloved "Reliques of Father
Prout" how "Loyola, the founder of the most learned and by far the
most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world,
was an old soldier who took up his 'Latin Grammar' when past the age
of t