The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal by Various
page 22 of 130 (16%)
page 22 of 130 (16%)
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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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