the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism
that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long
gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find
room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and
opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have
received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear
them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere
unconscious memories of sign-boards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang
from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I
purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not
more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny,' in
other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to
avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.

The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to
make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a
weapon instead of the mere fencing-stick I had supposed. Very far from
being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be
almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; saw
them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship
debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one
of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in
the pauses of a concert, that _I_ was utterly incompetent to have
written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter
worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire,
but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had
its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned,
too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and
definite purpose, whether aesthetic or moral, and that even good
writing, to please long, must have more than an average amount either of
imagination or common-sense. The first of these falls to the lot of
scarcely one in several generations; the last is within the reach of
many in every one that passes; and of this an author may fairly hope to
become in part the mouthpiece. If I put on the cap and bells and made
myself one of the court-fools of King Demos, it was less to make his
majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain
serious things which I had deeply at heart. I