Excerpt from Black Sheep: A Novel On the eath of Thomas Moore. An Ingoldsby Poem of his was accepted by Marguerite Power, and appeared amongst distinguished company in the Keepsake for 1853, being noticed encouragingly by the press. That year, before he was twenty-two years old, Yates married, an event that seems to have stimulated him to still greater literary activity. He rapidly found his way into several periodicals, and in 1854 published his first book, a shilling series of reprinted sketches, My Haunts and their Frequenters. The same year began a pleasant intimacy with Dickens, which was kept up until the untimely death of the great novelist, from whom Yates received genial encouragement, particularly when he began to write fiction. In 1854, also, he made the acquaintance of Frank Smedley, who was to edit Cruikshank's Magazine for Bogue, with Yates as one of his coadjutors. The magazine soon came to an end, after establishing a friendship between them, which bore fruit in a joint collection of tales in verse, Mirth and Metre, by two Merry Men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.