Mr. John Hay, once a Secretary of President Lincoln, and afterward a hard-working journalist, is also a poet, and has perpetrated some graceful verses, but when any one offers to quote a bit from John Hay, the hearers always understand that it will be something humorous. His dialect poems do not exceed half-a-dozen, yet they seem as popular now as when first written twenty years ago. They were not carefully elaborated; the author is said to have dashed them off in a hurry as a relief from hard editorial work, but they struck the popular heart at once, probably because, like most other American humor, there was a basis of seriousness and sense to them. The finale of his poem, “Little Breeches,”--a poetic story of a lost child who was saved, as his father supposed, by angels, will long be the most popular and effective protest against formal religious ideas. He says of the angels: “I think that savin’ a little child And bringin’ him back to his own Is a durn sight better bizness Than loafin’ round the throne.” Was there ever a greater commercial success in literature than that achieved by Mark Twain? The combined books of the most successful American novelist have not sold as many copies as one of Mark Twain’s books. Why? Because Mark Twain is funny--because he knows how to say something in a way in which nobody else has said it. Scores of other men have written about the Holy Land and our own West, but it was not until “Innocents Abroad” and “Roughing It” appeared that people in general began to manifest a lively interest in these portions of the world. Innumerable sketches have been written about life on the Mississippi River in the old days before railroads and emancipation, but all of them combined did not “catch” the public as successfully as “Huckleberry Finn.” The latter was humorous, the others were not; there was no other point of difference.