Although some of it was very popular at the moment and not altogether negligible to-day, his less important work was the succession of verses which were written in the spirit and, in some cases, at the speed of the journalist. "The Diamond Wedding," for example, was done in an evening and was the talk of the town thirty-six hours later. But, more than that, it was actually good satire,--as good a piece of its kind as had appeared in New York since Halleck's "Fanny." So, too, "Israel Freyer's Bid for Gold" was published three days after the idea had first occurred to him. These, like the "Ballad of Lager Bier" and "The Prince's Ball" and even "How Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry" represented the high spirit of youth rollicking on paper in the fashion of the young authors of the "Salmagundi" and "Croaker" satires. "Bohemia" and "Pan in Wall Street," though composed in this same general period, are far more sober, deliberate, and genuinely poetical. In both Stedman dealt with the romantic rather than with the ridiculous or contemptible in city life. From the years of his work on "The Victorian Poets" to the end two developments took place. He inclined more to refine on the form of his poems, giving over at last all fluent satire, and he progressed in subject matter, first to what literature and the past suggested and then, with advancing years, to considerations of age and death. The changes are not abrupt, but they are pervasive and evident. During the last dozen years of his life poetry could not be his natural form of expression, for the world was too much with him. A great deal of the time when he was not getting or losing on Change (he seems to have lost rather more than he spent) he devoted to service on all sorts of boards and councils of good works, speaking and versifying for special occasions, editing miscellaneously,--even a "Pocket Guide to Europe,"--and giving advice and encouragement to younger poets. He was admirably representing literature in its public relationships and paying the price which is always exacted of an ambassador of any sort in the complete sacrifice of independent leisure. There is something pathetic in his oft-repeated protests in these latter years at being called a "banker-poet" or "broker-poet," for he had failed to become rich as he had hoped, and he had enjoyed on the whole less security than many of his acquaintances who had attached themselves to literature in some professional way. This, however, had been a mistake not so much of judgment as of temperament. Unless his voluminous biography utterly misrepresents him he had no true capacity for leisure. He was an intellectual flagellant; and his poetry, although he was in theory devoted to it, was in reality a proof of the love of art which continually tantalized and distracted him but never won his complete allegiance. * * * * *