But, on looking up his poetry in the library, I found the same verses printed years before: "If bards of old the truth have told, The sirens had raven hair; But ever since the earth had birth, They paint the angels fair." Probably that was a habit with him.
When a friend joked him about his very-much-at-home manner at the United States Hotel at Saratoga, where he went every year, saying as they sat together on the upper piazza, "Why, Saxe, I should fancy you owned this hotel," he rose, and lounging against one of the pillars answered, "Well, I have a 'lien' on this piazza." His epigrams are excellent.

He has made more and better than any American poet.

In Dodd's large collection of the epigrams of the world, I think there are six at least from Saxe.

Let me quote two: AN EQUIVOCAL APOLOGY Quoth Madame Bas-Bleu, "I hear you have said Intellectual women are always your dread; Now tell me, dear sir, is it true ?" "Why, yes," answered Tom, "very likely I may Have made the remark in a jocular way; But then on my honour, I didn't mean you!" TOO CANDID BY HALF As John and his wife were discoursing one day Of their several faults, in a bantering way, Said she, "Though my _wit_ you disparage, I'm sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest This much, at the least, that my judgment is best." Quoth John, "So they said at our marriage." When Saxe heard of a man in Chicago who threw his wife into a vat of boiling hog's lard, he remarked: "Now, that's what I call going too far with a woman." After a railroad accident, in which he received some bruises, I said: "You didn't find riding on the rails so pleasant ?" "Not riding on, but riding off the rail was the trouble." He apostrophized the unusually pretty girl who at bedtime handed each guest a lighted candle in a candlestick.

She fancied some of the fashionable young women snubbed her but Saxe assured her in rhyme: "There is not a single one of them all Who could, if they would, hold a candle to you." He was an inveterate punster.