If you mean to write really "vituperative" sonnets (why sonnets?) let me tell you _one_ secret of success--name your victim and his offense. To do otherwise is to fire blank cartridges--to waste your words in air--to club a vacuum. At least your satire must be so personally applicable that there can be no mistake as to the victim's identity. Otherwise he is no victim--just a spectator like all others. And that brings us to Watson. His caddishness consisted, not in satirizing a woman, which is legitimate, but, first, in doing so without sufficient reason, and, second, in saying orally (on the safe side of the Atlantic) what he apparently did not dare say in the verses. * * * I'm enclosing something that will tickle you I hope--"The Ballade of the Goodly Fere." The author's[12] father, who is something in the Mint in Philadelphia, sent me several of his son's poems that were not good; but at last came this--in manuscript, like the others. Before I could do anything with it--meanwhile wearing out the paper and the patience of my friends by reading it at them--the old man asked it back rather peremptorily. I reluctantly sent it, with a letter of high praise. The author had "placed" it in London, where it has made a heap of talk. [12] Ezra Pound. It has plenty of faults besides its monotonous rhyme scheme; but tell me what you think of it. God willing, we shall eat Carmel mussels and abalones in May or June. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, D. C., March 7, 1910.] DEAR GEORGE, My plan is to leave here before April first, pass a few days in New York and then sail for Colon. If I find the canal work on the Isthmus interesting I may skip a steamer from Panama to see it. I've no notion how long it will take to reach San Francisco, and know nothing of the steamers and their schedules on the Pacific side. I shall of course want to see Grizzly first--that is to say, he will naturally expect me to. But if you can pull him down to Carmel about the time of my arrival (I shall write you the date of my sailing from New York) I would gladly come there. Carlt, whom I can see at once on arriving, can tell me where he (Grizzly) is. * * * I don't think you rightly value "The Goodly Fere." Of course no ballad written to-day can be entirely good, for it must be an imitation; it is now an unnatural form, whereas it was once a natural one. We are no longer a primitive people, and a primitive people's forms and methods are not ours. Nevertheless, this seems to me an admirable ballad, as it is given a modern to write ballads. And I think you overlook the best line: "The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue." The poem is complete as I sent it, and I think it stops right where and as it should-- "I ha' seen him eat o' the honey comb Sin' they nailed him to the tree."