NOTHING TO WEAR
“I confess,” writes William Allen Butler, in his Retrospect of Forty Years, “that I have sometimes felt a pang, or at least a thrill, of mortification that, after many years of toil to attain a desired place in my profession, my chief, if not only, claim to public recognition has been the writing of a few pages of society verse.”
When Mr. Butler died, twenty years ago, many learned societies passed resolutions of respect and regret, and panegyrics upon his legal attainments were pronounced in many courts; but he was quite right in thinking that all these would quickly fade. They are almost as though they had never been, and the great public still remembers him—in so far as it remembers him at all—only as the author of a single poem.
That poem, of course, is “Nothing to Wear,” published in 1857—the first bit of genuinely American rhymed satire in our literature. There had been satire before it from American pens, but the inspiration was that of Pope and Dryden. Here was a new note, something indigenous and original, a definite breaking away
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