1895 to his death in 1917. I remember walking up Fifth Avenue with him
one Sunday afternoon just after he had shown me a letter from the man
who was then Comptroller of the Currency. The letter was signed so
illegibly that my companion was in doubts as to the sender, so he
suggested that we stop at a well-known hotel at the corner of 59th
Street, and ask the manager who the Comptroller of the Currency then
was, so that he might know whom the letter was from. He said that the
manager of a big hotel like that, where many prominent people stayed,
would be sure to know. When this problem had been solved to our
satisfaction, John Skelton Williams proving to be the man, Lampton
said, "Now you've told me who he is, I'll show you who I am." So he
asked for a copy of _The American Magazine_ at a newsstand in the
hotel corridor, opened it, and showed the manager a full-page picture
of himself clad in a costume suggestive of the time of Christopher
Columbus, with high ruffs around his neck, that happened to appear in
the magazine the current month. I mention this incident to illustrate
the lack of conventionality and whimsical originality of the man, that
stood out no less forcibly in his writings than in his daily life. He
had little use for "doing the usual thing in the usual sort of way."
He first gained prominence by his book of verse, _Yawps_ (1900). His
poems were free from convention in technique as well as in spirit,
although their chief innovation was simply that as a rule there was no
regular number of syllables in a line; he let the lines be any length
they wanted to be, to fit the sense or the length of what he had to
say. He once said to me that if anything of his was remembered he
thought it would be his poem,_Lo, the Summer Girl_. His muse often
took the direction of satire, but it was always good-natured even when
it hit the hardest. He had in his makeup much of the detached
philosopher, like Cervantes and Mark Twain.