oy, a tremendous advantage. And then the
pictorials--a special artist has only to catch a conception, in a
Philadelphia or New York hospital, and straightway he works off an
"Andersonville prisoner," which carries conviction to those who can not
read the essay, upon the same subject, by his co-laborers with the pen.
What chance has a Southern writer against men who possess such
resources? At Fort Delaware, General Schoeff, the commandant, placed
some eighteen or twenty of us in the rooms built in the casemates of the
fort, and allowed us, for some time, the privilege of walking about the
island, upon our giving him our paroles not to attempt escape.

General M. Jeff. Thompson, of Missouri, was the only Confederate officer
at that prison, before our party arrived, but many others from Camp
Chase, came about the same time. General Thompson's military career, is
well known to his countrymen, but only his prison companions know how
kind and manly he can be under circumstances which severely try the
temper. His unfailing flow of spirits kept every one else, in his
vicinity cheerful and his hopefulness was contagious. He possessed,
also, an amazing poetical genius. He wrote with surprising fluency, and
his finest compositions cost him neither trouble nor thought. Shut him
up in a room with plenty of stationery, and in twenty-four hours, he
would write himself up to the chin in verse. His muse was singularly
prolific and her progeny various. He roamed recklessly through the realm
of poesy. Every style seemed his--blank verse and rhyme, ode and epic,
lyrical and tragical, satiric and elegiac, sacred and profane, sublime
and ridiculous, he was equally good at all. His poetry might not perhaps
have stood a very strict classification, but he produced a fair,
marketable sample, which deserved (his friends thought) to be quoted at
as liberal figures as some about which much more was said. General
Thompson would doubtless have been more successful as a poet, if he had
been a less honest and practical business man. He persisted in having
some meaning in all that he wrote, and only a first class poet can
afford to do that.

The cunning New England method is also the safest in the long run--when
a versifier suspects that he lacks the true inspiration, he had better
try the confidence game, and induce the public to admire by writing that
which no one can understand. It would seem, too, that writing poetry
and playing on the fiddle have