s than a year ago, and nobody
could answer it. Nobody, that is, in America. In England he was a
great man. He went over to England, unheralded, it is stated,
and was soon discovered to be a poet. Swinburne took him up; the
Rossettis took him up; the critics took him up; he was taken up
by everybody in England, except the police, who, as a rule, fight
shy of poets. He went to fashionable parties in a red shirt, with
trowsers tucked into his boots, and instead of being shown to the
door by the powdered footman, was received with enthusiasm. It is
incredible, but it is true. A different state of society existed,
thirty or forty years ago, when another American poet went to
England; and we advise our readers, who have leisure at their
command, to compare it with the present social lawlessness of the
upper classes among the English. To do this, they have only
to turn to the late N.P. Willis's "Pencilings by the Way," and
contrast his descriptions of the fashionable life of London then,
with almost any journalistic account of the same kind of life
now. The contrast will be all the more striking if they will
only hunt up the portraits of Disraeli, with his long, dark locks
flowing on his shoulders, and the portrait of Bulwer, behind his
"stunning" waistcoat, and his cascade of neck-cloth, and then
imagine Mr. Miller standing beside them, in his red shirt and
high-topped California boots! Like Byron, Mr. Miller "woke up one
morning and found himself famous."

We compare the sudden famousness of Mr. Miller with the sudden
famousness of Byron, because the English critics have done so;
and because they are pleased to consider Mr. Miller as Byron's
successor! Byron, we are told, was the only poet whom he had
read, before he went to England; and is the only poet to whom he
bears a resemblance. How any of these critics could have
arrived at this conclusion, with the many glaring imitations
of Swinburne--at his worst--staring him in the face from Mr.
Miller's volume, is inconceivable. But, perhaps, they do not read
Swinburne. Do they read Byron?

There are, however, some points of resemblance between Byron and
Mr. Miller. Byron traveled, when young, in countries not much
visited by the English; Mr. Miller claims to have traveled, when
young, in countries not visited by the English at all. This was,
and is, an advantage to both Byron and Mr. Miller. But it was,
and is, a serious disadvantage to their readers, who cannot well
ascer