The newspaper paragrapher has in recent years amused himself at the expense of Indiana as a literary centre, but Indianapolis as a village boasted writers of at least local reputation, and Coggeshall’s “Poets and Poetry of the West” (1867) attributes half a dozen poets to the Hoosier capital. The Indianapolis press has from the beginning been distinguished by enterprise and decency, and in several instances by vigorous independence. The literary quality of the city’s newspapers was high, even in the early days, and the standard has not been lowered. Poets with cloaks and canes were, in the eighties, pretty prevalent in Market Street near the post-office, the habitat then of most of the newspapers. The poets read their verses to one another and cursed the magazines. A reporter for one of the papers, who had scored the triumph of a poem in the “Atlantic,” was a man of mark among the guild for years. The local wits stabbed the fledgeling bards with their gentle ironies. A young woman of social prominence printed some verses in an Indianapolis newspaper, and one of her acquaintances, when asked for his opinion of them, said they were creditable and ought to be set to music--and played as an instrumental piece! The wide popularity attained by Mr. James Whitcomb Riley quickened the literary impulse, and the fame of his elders and predecessors suffered severely from the fact that he did not belong to the cloaked brigade. General Lew Wallace never lived at Indianapolis save for a few years in boyhood, while his father was governor, though toward the end of his life he spent his winters there. Maurice Thompson’s muse scorned “paven ground,” and he was little known at the capital even during his term of office as state geologist, when he came to town frequently from his home in Crawfordsville. Mr. Booth Tarkington, the most cosmopolitan of Hoosiers, has lifted the banner anew for a younger generation through his successful essays in fiction and the drama.