Page:Americans (1922).djvu/248

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

imagination. He so long encouraged the acceptance of the book as "history" that perhaps in his later years he actually lost the ability, never notable in him, to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed. In 1874 this book, with the title Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs, was brought out in a subscription edition by the American Publishing Company, and in the advertising pages of this edition is third in a list beginning with Mark Twain's. The Gilded Age and Josh Billings's Everybody's Friend. This will suggest to those who remember the American Publishing Company the sort and size of the audience that Miller was addressing in the middle's eventies.

In Memorie and Rime, Miller says that he returned to London in November, 1874, from his long wanderings in Europe. Apparently, however, he had returned to England in the preceding year, perhaps partly to enjoy the réclame of his two new books. In 1873, at any rate, he made his acquaintance with that poet and patron of the arts and great organizer of literary breakfasts, Lord Houghton. In Reid's Life of Lord Houghton little record remains of this friendship, except a letter of August 5, 1873, addressed to Gladstone, in which Miller is commended as "most interesting as poet and man; I have known and asked nothing as to his private life." Augustus Hare (The Story of My Life, vol. iv) makes a supercilious reference to the poet's appearance at one of these breakfasts: "Joaquin