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 McCreery was vociferating as loudly as the press would permit that he and not Bulwer was the author. But nobody had ever heard of McCreery, who was only an obscure government clerk, and everybody had heard of Bulwer, so McCreery was usually set down as a crank possessed by a harmless mania and dismissed with a pitying smile. It was just another instance of the old truth that to him that hath shall be given, while from him that hath not, even that shall be taken away!

There were a few who stopped to listen to McCreery's story, but he injured his case by setting forth at various times three versions of how he came to write the poem and what he did with it after he wrote it—versions which differed in important details. And if he was not sure in his own mind about it, how could he expect anybody else to be?

Before considering these versions, it may be well to give the facts of McCreery's life, so far as they are known.

John Luckey McCreery was the son of Joseph and Jane Luckey McCreery, and was born at Sweden, Monroe County, New York, on December 21 (or 31), 1835. Joseph McCreery was a Methodist minister, and the boy was destined to the same profession, but, as he himself puts it, he "became skeptical of many points of dogma regarded as essential by orthodox