Page:Fitz-Greene Halleck, A Memorial.djvu/31

Rh fame; it was the greatest compliment ever paid me in my life!”

There is no book like the Old Testament for poetry. “Study the ancient Hebrew,” he would say, “These be thy Gods, O Israel!”

He was annoyed at carping critics, who found fault with Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York. “There was no book like it; it was the only original book of the kind. A travestie of history! a travestie of what history! It is original, and full of Irving’s genius. Historians are great pilferers from one another. A short time ago, I read a history of the siege of Quebec, in which the author stated that during the siege they drew the cannon on a sled, and a short time after, I read a description of the same event by another historian, which is word for word like the other one, except that he says they drew the cannon on a sledge. Now, there is history for you! Byron has given a good description of a historian. He says that Mitford is just what a historian ought to be. He is full of wrath and partiality!”

When he liked a poem he would copy it off, and get it by heart. He once gave me a poem, “The Death of Jacob,” an Oxford prize poem, in seventy-seven stanzas, of four lines each, with notes, which he had copied from Littell’s Living Age. He told me once, that he never put pen to paper until he had finished the verse. He always composed while walking, roaming about the streets of New York, generally at night.

While Hicks was painting his portrait, he said, “I see he has caught that peculiar expression of my