University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

O such a very indiscriminate
collection
of fugitive
essays, and songs
not quite so fugitive,
hastily selected
from the hasty scribblings of a
year, and as hastily pitchforked together
in the double hurry and heat
of travelling and journalism, what
form of introduction can be requisite?
The very decided popular
success of a similar volume published last year, and
now in its ninth or tenth edition, is the best apology
that can be offered for the appearance of this, its successor.
It may also be urged that the various parts of
which it is composed, met with very distinct and general
acceptance at the time of their original appearance;
and that, as mementoes of how public opinion was
formed and ran during the closing stages of the war,

and in regard to various topics of great interest not
directly connected therewith, such as Fenianism, the
Monroe Doctrine, Louis Napoleon's character, and soforth,
these fugitive essays and verses have been thought
by many to deserve some more permanent form of
life.

Everything in the subjoined volume, no matter how
suppositiously credited in the text, is from the author's
pen, with the exception of two translations into Latin
of two of the author's lyrics of the war, from the pen
of his brother—one of the most eminent classical
scholars of Trinity College, Dublin; certain quotations
from the official documents of Gens. Hunter and Grant
connected with the war; a translation into German of
one of the same songs by Friedrich Gerstäcker, who is
said to be a poet of high fame and character in his own
particular part of Europe—wherever that may be; and
a translation of one of the odes of Horace from the pen
of General John A. Dix.

While thus claiming the execution of all the balance
of the volume, the author is anxious to make his acknowledgments
for prolific suggestions and wise advice
to Mr. James Gordon Bennett of the Herald, to whose
shrewd common-sense, very peculiar and pungent humor,
and immense experience of the world, he stands indebted
for the origination of many, and the encouragement
of all, of his recent literary projects. Mr. Bennett's
mind is an electric battery, apparently never to be
exhausted by the drafts made upon it for fresh ideas;
and he is one of those rare men whose ordinary conversation,
in any half hour of any day, can furnish hints

and ringing key-notes for the editorial labors of any
young journalist during the next week or fortnight.

The chapter giving the song of “The Flaunting Lie,”
as it has been called, and the history thereof, with the
other songs of the same series, will be read with interest
by all who remember how bitterly our honored
friend, Mr. Horace Greeley, was assailed for his imputed
authorship of that much misquoted and garbled lyric
during the last ten years, and more especially during the
recent Presidential canvass. For evil or for good, that
song has now passed into history; and in connexion
therewith the author would only say, that he was at all
times ready to avow its authorship, but was restrained
by the suggestion of Mr. Greeley that in “politics, a lie
well stuck to is as good as truth;” and that, no matter
what avowals were made in regard to the song, Mr.
Greeley's enemies would still continue to hold him
responsible therefor, and to grable and misquote such
verses of it as might seem to suit their purposes.

The long chapter on Fenianism is preserved as a
historical relic of some interest, no matter what may be
the fate of that curious and erratic movement. It was
this article—originally published in the Herald and
thence copied in full by the London Times, and a majority
of the leading papers of Great Britain and
Europe—that first called any serious public attention
to the existence of such an Order; and it was from the
notoriety thus given that the Brotherhood more than
trebled their numbers in the six months next following
its publication; and that a movement previously dying
out from want of activity and ventilation, became at

once one of the actual, if not avowed elements, more
or less operative, in the international politics of France,
Great Britain, and the United States.

For the rest, the volume must be taken as each
reade will find it—sometimes homorous, sometimes
grave, but always with an earnest and wholesome purpose,
as the author hopes. There are in it some few
chapters of personal recollections of the war—only a
prelude to a larger and more careful work of the same
character, which the writer will endeavor to get time
for collecting and writing during the present year.
There are in it, also, many poems and songs of greater
or less merit, nearly all written within the past year,
save “The Union Convoy” and the series of “The
Flaunting Lie;” and of these, as well, with the best
or least bad of his other songs previously published in
book-form and in the newspapers and magazines, it is
the author's hope to have a handsomely illustrated
volume made up for next Christmas.