Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/249

 speaking to Miller, ‘didn’t I tell you that fellow was a fool? Now I know he’s crazy.’

“Well, the world has had the benefit of my brain baby for thirty years,” Joyce concludes, “although ‘Exchange,’ ‘Anonymous,’ and other literary robbers have claimed it. What care I? Mankind can make the most of it. More than a dozen other of my verses have gone the rounds of the press under the colors of some plagiarist.

“The glorious Prentice has slept beneath the sod for nearly a quarter of a century, but the grand thoughts he uttered in life will spread over the years like perfume from an unseen censer and thrill the heart of mankind when the memory of his social and literary critics are washed into the waters of oblivion.”

It is unfortunate that Prentice died before Joyce made this story public. There might then have been some confirmation of it. As it is, there is none; nor does memory recall any ode of Horace, “the Falernian wine poet,” to whom Joyce refers in such off-hand fashion, dealing with the subject of Mrs. Wilcox’s poem. There can be no doubt, indeed, that Joyce’s story was manufactured out of whole cloth. If he wrote the verses in 1863 they would certainly have appeared somewhere before they were published over Ella Wheeler’s name twenty years later, and he would undoubtedly have included