Many imitators have paid tribute to Mr. Riley’s dialect verse, for most can grow the flowers after the seed have been freely blown in the market-place. Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to Mr. Riley’s essential veracity is to compare the verse of those who have made attempts similar to his own. He is, for example, a much better artist than Will Carleton, who came before him, and whose “Farm Ballads” are deficient in humor; and he possesses a breadth of sympathy and a depth of sincerity that Eugene Field did not attain in dialect verse, though Field’s versatility and fecundity were amazing. There is nowhere in Mr. Riley a trace of the coarse brutality with which Mr. Hamlin Garland, for example, stamps the life of a region lying farther west. There is no point of contact between Lowell and Mr. Riley in their dialectic performances, as civic matters do not interest the Indianian; and his view of the Civil War becomes naturally that of the countryman who looks back with wistful melancholy, not to the national danger and dread, but to the neighborhood’s glory and sorrow, as in “Good-by, Jim.” It might also be said that Mr. Riley has never put the thoughts of statesmen into the mouths of countrymen, as Lowell did, consistency being one of his qualities. There has sprung up in Mr. Riley’s time a choir of versifiers who are journalistic rather than literary, and who write for the day, much as the reporters do. Mr. Riley, more than any one else, has furnished the models for these, and it would seem that verses could be multiplied interminably, or so long as such refrains as “When father winds the clock” and “The hymns that mother used to sing” can be found for texts.