were free from convention in technique as well as in spirit,
although their chief innovation was simply that as a rule there was no
regular number of syllables in a line; he let the lines be any length
they wanted to be, to fit the sense or the length of what he had to
say. He once said to me that if anything of his was remembered he
thought it would be his poem,_Lo, the Summer Girl_. His muse often
took the direction of satire, but it was always good-natured even when
it hit the hardest. He had in his makeup much of the detached
philosopher, like Cervantes and Mark Twain.

There was something cosmic about his attitude to life, and this showed
in much that he did. He was the only American writer of humorous verse
of his day whom I always cared to read, or whose lines I could
remember more than a few weeks. This was perhaps because his work was
never _merely_ humorous, but always had a big sweep of background to
it, like the ruggedness of the Kentucky mountains from which he came.
It was Colonel George Harvey, then editor of _Harper's Weekly_, who
had started the boom to make Woodrow Wilson President. Wilson
afterwards, at least seemingly, repudiated his sponsor, probably
because of Harvey's identification with various moneyed interests.
Lampton's poem on the subject, with its refrain, "Never again, said
Colonel George," I remember as one of the most notable of his poems on
current topics. But what always seemed to me the best of his poems
dealing with matters of the hour was one that I suggested he write,
which dealt with gift-giving to the public, at about the time that
Andrew Carnegie was making a big stir with his gifts for libraries,
beginning:

Dunno, perhaps
One of the yaps
Like me would make
A holy break
Doing his turn
With money to burn.
Anyhow, I
Wouldn't shy
Making a try!

and containing, among many effective touches, the pathetic lines,

... I'd help
The poor who try to help themselves,
Who have to work so hard for bread
They can't get very far ahead.

When James Lane Allen's novel, _The Reign of Law_, came out (1900), a
little quatrain by Lampton that appeared in _The Bookman_ (September,
1900) swept like wildfire across the country, and was read by a
hundred times as many people as the book itself:

"The Reign of Law"?
Well, Allen, you're lucky;
It's the first time it ever
Rained law in Kentucky!

The reader need not be reminded that at that per