“What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at least of the Venusian’s character.  He could say of his affection for the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the ’poet of the happy Tityrus,’ ‘I that loved thee since my day began.’  It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years.  I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis’s translation of the eighth of the first book of Horatian Satires: 

  Not to be tedious or repeat
  How Flats and Sharps in concert meet.

“Field’s knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete, probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft.  He made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it.  And it is more likely, as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption (Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite classic poet than from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce.”

Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of Field’s intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace anticipates the period of his Horatian “hobby,” as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it, by at least five years.  It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm.  But that is another story.

According to M.E.  Stone, the title of the column which Field established when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of a play, “Sharps and Flats,” written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and played with considerable success throughout the United States by Messrs. Robson and Crane.

[Illustration:  Robson.  Crane.—­Crane.  Robson.  ROBSON AND CRANE IN THE PLAY “SHARPS AND FLATS”]

It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the “Sharps and Flats” column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.

To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.