"Oh, 'tis of that bloody Blackbeard
I'm going now to tell,
And as how, by gallant Maynard,
He soon was sent to hell,
With a down, down, down, derry down!"
James lifted his hands at this refrain after the old English ballad style.
"Ben, I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll print the verses for you, and you shall sell them on the street."
The poet Arion at his coronation at Corinth could not have felt prouder than little Ben at that hour. He would be both a poet and bookseller, and his brother would be his publisher.
He may have cried on Boston street:
"Blackboard—broadside!" or something like that. It would have been honorable advertising.
His success as a poet was instantaneous. His poem sold well. Compliments fell upon him like a sun shower. He wrote another poem of like value, and it sold "prodigiously." He thought indeed he was a great poet, and had started out on Shakespeare's primrose way to fame and glory. Alas! how many under like circumstances have been deceived. He lived to call his ballads "wretched stuff." How many who thought they were poets have lived to take the same view of their work!
His second poem was called the Light-House Tragedy. It related to a recent event, and set the whole town to talking, and the admiration for the young poet was doubled.
In the midst of the great sale of his poems by himself, and of all the flatteries of the town, he went for approval to his father. The result was unexpected; the rain of sunshine changed into a winter storm indeed.
"Father, you have heard that I have become a poet?"