age and nation, Heliodorus, Cinthio, Mendoza, Calprenede, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, were laid under contribution. Each occurrence, important or trivial, was magnified, lifted into what we conceived to be epic grandeur.
Our style unconsciously resembled that of John Lilly: we certainly wrote as Walter Scott makes Sir Piercie Shafton talk. We imagined it entirely original, and it was surely bad enough to be. But our sentiments and opinions must have been thought even worse. They were opposed to everything that exists: our scepticism was rampant: we proclaimed against authority, custom, law. We were inimical to marriage on what we believed to be philosophic grounds; but, if marriage had been suddenly abolished, we should, doubtless, have advocated its revival. We were in the condition that Carlyle calls Wertherism, peculiar to very young men who generalize from a few data, and substitute imagination for experience. We were, or fancied we were, unequivocal pessimists: we admired Schopenhauer, because, as we phrased it, he had uttered our thought. We were Bohemians of the Henry Murger school, except that we had a bias in behalf of neat attire and the discharge of debts. Our faith was disbelief; our practice, though we knew it not, was egotism, affectation, and pedantry. We were sentimental cynics, misanthropic idealists.
There never is, and never can be, such intense cynicism as is expressed by healthy, well-to-do youths in their early twenties: the woes they lack they invent; the wrongs they have not suffered, they evolve from their inner consciousness. Cincinnati gained a wide reputation as the city of romantic scribes and transcendental journalists. The example it set became infectious: its sesquipedalian words and bombastic phrases passed, in a measure, into newspaper currency. I am not sure that a good deal of the grandiloquent Greek and Latin English, for which the average reporter has got to be noted, is not derived from that period. Plow the newspaper proprietors tolerated it, is beyond comprehension. Perhaps they did not read it: if they had read it, they might not have understood it; for it was really a macaronic language. It is not improbable that everybody, save ourselves, regarded the whole thing as a stupendous joke. We thought that we were terribly in earnest; and therein consisted the actual jest. The war came; the euphuistic ravers went into it, in one capacity or another, and that erratic form of journalism ended, never, it is needless to say, to be revived. Newspapers are differently conducted now. If we had had any such influence as we thought, we should have revolutionized society. But our elders graciously gave "the boys" their head. It diverted us, and could do no one harm.
My campaigning as a war correspondent of the New York Tribune was wholly in the Southwest. The field was much broader, more varied, more interesting, than in Virginia, where the Army of the Potomac, for the better part of four years, moved mainly between the Potomac and the James. The forces under Grant and his assistants opened the Mississippi from Columbus to the mouth, and restored all the adjacent territory to the Union. The correspondents there were not restricted: they went where they liked; did what they chose, within
