and lampooned political oracles. He was the unsparing satirist of
contemporary pretense, which in itself was sufficient to account for
the failure of the passing generation of literary critics to accord to
him the recognition which he finally won in their despite from the
reading public. Neither a sinner nor a saint was the man who went into
an old book-store in Chicago and bewildered the matter-of-fact dealer
in old editions with the inquiry, "Have you an unexpurgated copy of
Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?"

Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for
earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art,
like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to
magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a
two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little
or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life--those minor sympathies
that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of
life--of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his
life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in
his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions,
wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil
of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within
the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and
through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He
associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and
wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he
became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and
griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.

"In wit a man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or
pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack