The Complete Poetical Works Of John Hay, Including Many Poems Now First Collected. INTRODUCTION. THE purpose of an Introduction is to introduce, and as the Pike County characters are already boning acquaintances if not old friends of most readers, it is not necessary to dwell on their associations or antecedents. There is an interesting allusion in a newspaper clipping which I recently came across in an old scrabook CoI. Thornas W. Knox, now on his way around the world, was told this story by an English gentleman in Tokyo, Japan The latter had attended, not Iong before, a dinner party in London, at which George Eliot was present, among other noted littrateurs. The conversation naturally turned upon the shop, and, referring to American authors, she pronounced John Hays Jim Bludso one of the finest gems in the English language, At the general request of the company she arose and recited the poem, the tears flowing from her eyes as she spoke the closing lines. My father himself had a weakness for BIudso and he wrote to Joseph Bishop in 1880 . . . I thoroughly appreciate a good word spoken for Jim, who is a friend of mine. I shudder and hide in the cellar only den the boy with the small knickerbockers is mentioned. Though it amused him to write them, my father could never understand the popularity of his frontier sketches. He grew very tired of hearing them quoted, and even before 1880 he said that he wished people would forget the Ballads, but haIf a century has shown that these rough-hewn models of Western types are destined to outlive all his other poetical efforts. The poems previously published in book form seem to need no further introductory mention, but it is the presence of the UncolIected Verses that gives this edition a peculiar interest...