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The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal by Various
page 22 of 130 (16%)
We are inclined to think that such is not the fact. We think,
on the whole, that it is to the other Miller--Joking Miller--his
genealogy is to be traced.

But who is Mr. Miller, and what has he done? A good many besides
ourselves put that question, less than a year ago, and nobody
could answer it. Nobody, that is, in America. In England he was a
great man. He went over to England, unheralded, it is stated,
and was soon discovered to be a poet. Swinburne took him up; the
Rossettis took him up; the critics took him up; he was taken up
by everybody in England, except the police, who, as a rule, fight
shy of poets. He went to fashionable parties in a red shirt, with
trowsers tucked into his boots, and instead of being shown to the
door by the powdered footman, was received with enthusiasm. It is
incredible, but it is true. A different state of society existed,
thirty or forty years ago, when another American poet went to
England; and we advise our readers, who have leisure at their
command, to compare it with the present social lawlessness of the
upper classes among the English. To do this, they have only
to turn to the late N.P. Willis's "Pencilings by the Way," and
contrast his descriptions of the fashionable life of London then,
with almost any journalistic account of the same kind of life
now. The contrast will be all the more striking if they will
only hunt up the portraits of Disraeli, with his long, dark locks
flowing on his shoulders, and the portrait of Bulwer, behind his
"stunning" waistcoat, and his cascade of neck-cloth, and then
imagine Mr. Miller standing beside them, in his red shirt and
high-topped California boots! Like Byron, Mr. Miller "woke up one
morning and found himself famous."

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