It is reported that Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox is anxious to institute against Colonel John A. Joyce such legal proceedings as will determine beyond all doubt that she, and not Colonel Joyce, was the author of the poem entitled "Love and Laughter," and beginning: _"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."_ Mrs. Wilcox is perhaps the most touchy person in American literature at the present time. For a number of years she has been contributing to the newspaper press of the country, and her verses have been subjected to the harshest sort of criticism. The paragraphists of the press have bastinadoed and gibbeted her in the most cruel manner; her poems have been burlesqued, parodied, and travestied heartlessly--in short, every variety of criticism has been heaped upon her work, which, even the most prejudiced will admit, has evinced remarkable boldness and an amazing facility of expression. Now we would suppose that all this shower of criticism had tanned the fair author's hide--we speak metaphorically--until it was impervious to every unkindly influence. But so far from being bomb-proof, Mrs. Wilcox is even more sensitive than when she bestrode her Pegasus for the first time and soared into that dreamy realm where the lyric muse abides. There is not a quip nor a quillet from the slangy pen of the daily newspaper writers that she does not brood over and worry about as heartily as if it were an overdue mortgage on her pianoforte. We presume to say that the protests which she has made within the last two years against the utterances of the press would fill a tome. Now this Joyce affair is simply preposterous; we do not imagine that there is in America at the present time an ordinarily intelligent person who has ever believed for one moment that Colonel Joyce wrote the poem in question--the poem entitled "Love and Laughter." Colonel Joyce is an incorrigible practical joker, and his humor has been marvellously tickled by the prodigious worry his jest has cost the Wisconsin bard. The public understands the situation; there is no good reason why Mrs. Wilcox should fume and fret and scurry around, all on account of that poem, like a fidgety hen with one chicken. Her claim is universally conceded; there is no shadow of doubt that she wrote the poem in question, and by becoming involved in any further complication on this subject she will simply make a laughing-stock of herself; we would be sorry to see her do that.