shaw of the New York "Times" into swallowing a yarn about the poem (found, as alleged, in an "old scrapbook") having been sung as a charity by English buccaneers in the Caribbem, say a century ago. The literary Hawkshaw was taken in so completely that subsequent admission of his error, upon an unanswerable presentation of the real facts, was not easily wrung from him:—there is nothing like a Texas mule or a literary expert for a certain kind of opinionative contumacioushess. Howbeit, the laurel of "The Dead Men's Song" has now finally been placed upon the modest yet Jovian brow of Mr. Young E. Allison, a veteran journalist of Louisville, Ky. Or to speak with allowable metaphor, that rakish craft, the "Derelict," with her papers finally cleared and her true skipper on board, now stands out to sea for the long voyage!
This same Allison ought to be a man delightfully worth knowing, to judge from a certain tall red-and-green volume of appreciation in his honor lately put forth in a privately published edition by his friend Champion Ingraham Hitchcock, also of Louisville and the honorable profession of journalism. The book fully establishes Mr. Allison's claim to the parentage of the truculent chef d'oeuvre so long disputed about and errantly fathered, and also raises the wonder that he should have been content with having once miraculously centred the bullseye of literary achievement. However, according to a famous French critic, the man who produces only one masterpiece,—be it only a single page of perfect prose or verse,—has a better chance of future fame than the author of many volumes indifferently good. Indeed fame seems to have made a special provision for carrying the monopoematic genius, as a search of the anthologies will readily disclose. In its peculiar class Allison's poem is as memorable as Poe's "Raven"—and I can see him still steering that sullen "Derelict" of his upon future seas not a wave of which will be hazarded by many admired literary cockboats of the present time.
This, I am proud to advance, is also the view of Mr. James Whitcomb Riley (an undoubted Immortal) who in a letter to the present writer coins an inspired word, "delishamous," to express his pleasure in the poe, and, who has heretofore estimated it as a "masterly, and exquisite ballad of
