I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield’s memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as “Homer,” “Sophocles,” “Virgil,” “Milton,” and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put anything of this sort into print.  He would warn me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield’s verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty editions of his Farmer’s Boy were issued within three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half a century afterwards.  There are other better tests.  Is it alive to-day?  What do judges of literature say of it now?  Nothing!  They smile and that’s all.  The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day.  Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer’s Boy and it made him sick.  Well, nobody wants to look at it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to extenuate my folly—­to say, in the end, that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of his poems, the Farmer’s Boy, is not wholly a matter of literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some extent, a matter of association,—­and as the story of how this comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find something about nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most important thing in life.  For who could look on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him!  In due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such subjects.  Unfortunately this kind of literature was not obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas.  There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves —­theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was there, except