Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances,
alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how
to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He
scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent
was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to
support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and
reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very
outset of his career.

If he set "no store by genius," he at least had that faith in his own
ability which "compels the elements and wrings a human music from the
indifferent air." From the time he applied himself to the ill-requited
work of journalism he never wavered or turned aside in his purpose to
make it the ladder to literary recognition. He was over thirty before
he realized that in three universities he had slighted the opportunity
to acquire a thorough equipment for literary work. But he was
undismayed, for did he not read in his beloved "Reliques of Father
Prout" how "Loyola, the founder of the most learned and by far the
most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world,
was an old soldier who took up his 'Latin Grammar' when past the age
of thirty"?

It is the contrast and apparent contradiction between the individual
and the author that makes the character of Eugene Field interesting to
the student. If the man were simply any prosaic person possessed of
the gift of telling tales, writing stories, and singing lullabies,
this study of his life would have been left unwritten. Many authors
have I known who put all there was of them into their work, who were
personally a disappointment to the intellect and a trial to the flesh.
With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises,