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 to have the will in excess of the understanding and the understanding ill-informed. There are people of all nationalities whom a pinch more brains and a trifle more of difidence would not hurt."

The chilliness of American literary criticism was not all, nor perhaps the worst, that Miller had to face on his return to the United States. During his absence in Europe, he had been accused at home, and not without a basis in fact, of deserting his wife. His celebrity as author of Songs of the Sierras gave newspaper value to the story. And in the fall of 1871, "Minnie Myrtle" made the entire subject a topic for editorial comment, both at home and abroad, by corroborating the story and then proceeding, in the spirit of magnanimity or of irony or of publicity, to justify the poet. Early in 1872, The Saturday Review summarized Mrs. Miller's communication to the American press, and discussed it at length, with elaborate comparison of the classical case of Lord Byron. From this discussion the following extract will suffice for our purposes:

The public, she holds [by her own act belying the contention] has nothing to do with Mr. Miller except as a poet, and has no right to sit in judgment on his conduct as a husband or father; and in the next place, poets are different from other people, and their lives must be judged, if at all, by a different standard. Mr. Miller, we are informed, "felt that he was gifted, and his mind being of a fine, poetic structure, and his brain very delicately organ-