House, at Louisville, Ky., by Colonel John A. Joyce, from ten to twenty years ago.  Joyce was in the midst of a party of convivial friends.  After several cases of champagne had been tossed down, a member of the party said to Colonel Joyce, “Come, old fellow, give us an extempore poem.”  As Colonel Joyce had not utilized his muse for at least twenty minutes, he cordially assented to the proposition, and while the waiter was bringing a fresh supply of wine Colonel Joyce dashed off the dialect poem so highly praised by the New York Sun.  We are amazed that he has laid no claim to its authorship since its revival.  Unfortunately, all the gentlemen who were present at the time he dashed off the poem are dead, or there would be no trouble in substantiating his claims to its authorship.  We distinctly remember he wrote it the same evening he dashed off the pretty poem so violently claimed by, and so generally accredited to, Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

This was written in February, 1885, and though it failed of its ostensible aim of discrediting Miss McLean’s authorship of “The Lost Sheep,” it succeeded in rekindling throughout the exchanges the smouldering fires of the dispute Field had himself started over that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude,” the relevant verse of which runs: 

  Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
    Weep, and you weep alone,
  For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
    But has troubles enough of its own. 
  Sing, and the hills will answer;
    Sigh, it is lost on the air,
  The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
    But shrink from voicing care.

From the day “Solitude” appeared in Miss Wheeler’s “Poems of Passion” in 1883, and so long as Field lived, he never ceased to fan this controversy into renewed life, more often than not by assuming a tone of indignation that there should be any question over it, as in the following recurrence to the subject in July, 1885: 

It is reported that Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox is anxious to institute against Colonel John A. Joyce such legal proceedings as will determine beyond all doubt that she, and not Colonel Joyce, was the author of the poem entitled “Love and Laughter,” and beginning: 

  "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."

Mrs. Wilcox is perhaps the most touchy person in American literature at the present time.  For a number of years she has been contributing to the newspaper press of the country, and her verses have been subjected to the harshest sort of criticism.  The paragraphists of the press have bastinadoed and gibbeted her in the most cruel manner; her poems have been burlesqued, parodied, and travestied heartlessly—­in short, every variety of criticism has been heaped upon her work, which, even the most prejudiced will admit, has evinced remarkable boldness and an amazing facility of expression.  Now we would suppose