his drama "Oregonia," and having printed, at his own expense, a hundred copies, scoured the city seeking a publisher. But the publishers would have none of it. Murray, "son of the great Murray, Byron's friend," received him, indeed, and showed him many pictures of Byron, but rejected the proffered opportunity to become Joaquin's publisher, saying, with definitive uplifted finger: "Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, don't you know?"
In other quarters he met with better fortune. Knocking at the door of Punch, as a nameless American, he was cordially received by "my first, firmest friend in London," a man in whose arms Artemus Ward had died,—Tom Hood, son of the famous humorist. By March, 1871, he got his Pacific Poems to the reviews and into a kind of private circulation without a publisher. Almost at once both book and author began to catch the fancy of the London literary tasters, who are always hospitably inclined to real curiosities from overseas, and welcome a degree of crudity in a transatlantic writer as evidence that he is genuinely American. By the end of the month, "Arazonian" was attributed by the Saint James Gazette to Robert Browning; and, notes the diary, "Walter Thornbury, Dickens' dear friend, and a better poet than I can hope to be, has hunted me up, and says big things of the 'Pacific Poems' in the London Graphic." There are, moreover, "two splendid enthusiasts
