Never was youth more industrious in his efforts at self-mastery. He wasted not a moment. He discovered Macaulay and read him as most boys read pirate stories. "Of course I reformed my prose style, which had been carefully modeled after that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sentences and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words." His health began to suffer from his application, but he worked steadily on. He produced quantities of poems and even a novel or two which he either destroyed or consigned to the oblivion of the newspaper upon which he worked. Later he enlarged the field of his literary apprenticeship by securing a position on a Columbus journal, or as he has himself expressed it, he was "for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city."[100] Then he began to enlarge his literary field by contributing "poems and sketches and criticisms for the _Saturday Press_ of New York."[100] In December, 1859, he issued his first book, _Poems of Two Friends_, a small volume of rather ordinary verses written in conjunction with J. J. Piatt, and a few months later he published a campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, a book more notable for its effect upon its author's fortunes than for any quality it may have had, for it was as a result of it that he was sent in 1861 to Italy for a glorious four years of graduate study, if we may so term it, in Italian literature and language and life. One cannot dwell too carefully upon these years of Howells's literary apprenticeship. As one reads his published work one finds from the first no immaturities. He burst upon the reading public as a finished writer. When his work first began to appear in the East, the _North American Review_ of Boston voiced its astonishment: We made occasion to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the rough and ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with no advantage of college training, who, passing from the compositor's desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated.[101]