Learning is, as Higginson has aptly condensed it, not accumulation, but assimilation; and “the Hoosier poet” was born one of those fortunate men to whom schools are a mere incident of education, but who walk through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock of knowledge. Bagehot enlarges on this trait as he discovers it in Shakespeare, “throughout all whose writings,” he says, “you see an amazing sympathy with common people.” The common people caught and held the attention of Mr. Riley, and as the annalist of their simple lives he established himself firmly in public affection. The half a dozen colleges within a radius of fifty miles of his home did not attract him; he was bred to no business, but followed in a tentative way occupations that brought him into contact with people. He began to write because he felt the impulse, and not because he breathed a literary atmosphere or looked forward to a literary career. His imagination needed some outlet, and he made verses just as he drew pictures or acquired a knack at playing the guitar, taking one talent about as seriously as the other. A Western county seat, with its daily advent of pilgrims from the farms, affords an entertaining panorama for a bright boy, and Mr. Riley began in his youth that careful observation of the Indiana country folk, their ways and their speech, that was later to afford him a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material. He had in his younger days something of Artemus Ward’s fondness for a hoax, and he wrote “Leonaine,” in imitation of Poe’s manner, with so marked success that several critics of discernment received the poem, and the story of its discovery in an old school reader, in good faith. In the experimental period of his career he read widely and to good purpose, learning the mechanics of prosody from the best models. His ear was naturally good, and he was distinctly original in his ideas of form. He delighted in the manipulation of words into odd and surprising combinations, and though the results were not always dignified, they were, nevertheless, curious and amusing, and brought him a degree of local fame. Mr. Riley’s contributions were wholly to newspapers through many years, during which the more deliberate periodicals would have none of him. He printed poems in the _Herald_, an Indianapolis weekly paper, in which the poems of Edith M. Thomas and others who have since gained a literary reputation first saw the light; and having attracted the attention of E. B. Martindale, the owner of the Indianapolis _Journal_, he was regularly employed on that paper, between 1877 and 1885, printing many of his best pieces there. He had the pleasure of seeing his verses widely copied at that period, when the newspaper press was his only medium of communication, and before he had printed a volume. His first marked recognition followed the publication in the _Journal_ of a series of poems signed “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,”