Nothing to Wear
of them rallied enthusiastically around Miss Peck, who became a sort of nine days’ wonder, her partizans pointing out, quite justly, what a remarkable achievement it was for so young a girl to have written even thirty-nine lines of such a poem.
But her triumph was short-lived, for Mr. Butler soon decided that the only thing for him to do was to disclose his authorship, which he did in a card stating “in the most explicit and unmistakable terms that every line and word in ‘Nothing to Wear’ was original with him and branding the claim as utterly false.” Horace Greeley, who lived next door to Mr. Butler (and kept a goat in the back yard, much to the annoyance of his neighbors), came to his defense in an editorial in the Tribune, and Harper’s Weekly confirmed Mr. Butler’s statement and denounced Miss Peck as a fraud. Thereafter, no sensible person ever questioned his authorship of the poem, though a few very silly ones still affected to regard him as a thief and impostor.
Mr. Butler, as has been said, was always proud of the moral twist he had given the poem at the end, but a more discerning judgment was well expressed by a French reviewer, M. Étienne, who admired the poem as a true expression of American humor until he came to
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