Famous Single Poems
the only children I have), wandering up and down the land like “Japhet in Search of a Father,” there is still enough left of parental pride to acknowledge them as mine, and enough left of poetic honor to rescue others from the charge of their paternity.
The Evening Post, strangely enough, did not offer any comment upon this letter, but confirmation of Mr. Greene’s statements was quick in coming from another quarter. In 1875, Mr. Francis E. Leupp had been a member of the editorial staff of the Evening Post, but in 1880 he was connected with the Syracuse Herald, and in the issue for December 12 published a statement to the effect that it was he who had received the manuscript of “What Her Lover Said,” which Mr. Greene had mailed to the Evening Post, that he “had dressed it up, amending some trifling errors of word and punctuation, put what he deemed a better title to it, cut down the writer’s name to a simple pair of initials, H. G., and given it to the printer.
“The only reasons I have for bringing up the matter here,” Mr. Luepp concludes, “are to suggest what is the possible origin of some of the charges of plagiarism brought against modern literary men, to set the public right on a matter in which I have unintentionally deceived them, and to tender Mr. Homer Greene, of
302
