“Prout’s translations from Horace are too free and easy,” solemnly said the London Athenaeum, reviewing them as they came out more than sixty years ago.  And no wonder, for Prout invented Horatian odes that he might translate them into such rollicking stanzas as Burns’s “Green Grow the Rashes, O!”

That Field, at the time of which I am writing (1885), had quite an idea of following in the wake of Father Prout may be indicated by the following Latin jingle written in honor of his friend, Morgan Bates, who, with Elwin Barren, had written a play of western life entitled “The Mountain Pink.”  It was described as a “moral crime,” and had been successfully staged in Chicago.

  MAECENAS

  Mons! aliusque cum nobis,
     Illicet tibi feratum,
  Quid, ejusmodi hoec vobis,
     Hunc aliquando erratum

  Esse futurus fuisse,
     Melior optimus vates? 
  Quamquam amo amavisse—­
     Bonum ad Barron et Bates!

  Gloria, Mons! sempiturnus,
     Jupiter, Pluvius, Juno,
  Itur ad astra diurnus,
     Omnes et ceteras uno!

  Fratres! cum bibite vino,
     Moralis, criminis fates,
  Montem hic vita damfino—­
     Hic vita ad Barron et Bates._

A very slight knowledge of Latin verse is needed to detect that this has no pretence to Latin composition such as Father Mahony’s scholarship caracoled in, but is merely English masquerading in classical garb.

Father Prout also introduced Field to fellowship with Beranger, the national song writer of France, to whom, next to the early English balladists and Horace, he owes so much of that clear, simple, sparkling style that has given his writings enduring value.  Beranger’s description of himself might, with some modifications, be fitted to Field:  “I am a good little bit of a poet, clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs have brought some success.”  Beranger chose to sing for the people of France, Field for the children of the world.  Field caught his fervor for Beranger from the enthusiasm of Prout.

“I cannot for a moment longer,” wrote he, “repress my enthusiastic admiration for one who has arisen in our days to strike in France with a master hand the lyre of the troubadour and to fling into the shade all the triumphs of bygone minstrelsy.  Need I designate Beranger, who has created for himself a style of transcendent vigor and originality, and who has sung of war, love, and wine, in strains far excelling those of Blondel, Tyrtaeus, Pindar, and the Teian bard.  He is now the genuine representative of Gallic poesy in her convivial, her amatory, her warlike and her philosophic mood; and the plenitude of the inspiration that dwelt successively in the souls of all the songsters of ancient France seems to have transmigrated into Beranger and found a fit recipient in his capacious and liberal mind.”

That Field caught the inspiration of Beranger more truly than Father Prout, those who question can judge for themselves by a comparison of their respective versions of “Le Violon Brise”—­the broken fiddle.  A stanza by each must suffice to show the difference: