could be more sensitive than was his
to influences of this kind. As we moved cautiously about him,
anxious about the equilibrium, though he was calm, he discoursed with
animation. The afternoon waned gloriously into the dusk of the happy
day.

The little hill-town of Petersham in the back of Worcester County was
John Fiske's summer home, a spot he tenderly loved. It is a retired
place made very attractive in later years through the agency of his
brother-in-law, who with wise and kindly art has added to the natural
beauty. I saw John Fiske here in his home of homes to which his heart
clung more and more fondly as his end approached. The weight of
his great body, accumulating morbidly in a way which could not be
counteracted, fairly overwhelmed at last his bright and noble life. As
the doctors put it, a heart made for a frame of one hundred and sixty
pounds could not do the work for three hundred. When, in his weakness,
death was suggested to him as probably near, "Death!" said he simply
and sweetly, "why, that only means going to Petersham to stay!" and
there among the flowers and fields, remote from the world, though his
spirit remains widely and solemnly pervasive, he has gone to stay.

CHAPTER VII

ENGLISH AND GERMAN HISTORIANS

When I went to England in 1886 to collect materials for a life of
Young Sir Henry Vane, John Fiske gave me a letter to Dr. Richard
Garnett, then Superintendent of the Reading Room in the British
Museum. He afterwards became Sir Richard Garnett and was promoted to
be Keeper of Printed Books, perhaps the highest position among the
librarians of the world, a post to which he did honour. Dr. Garnett,
slender and alert, the heaped-up litter of volumes and manuscripts in
his study telling at a glance where his tastes lay, was nevertheless
as he needed to be most practical and business-like. Though an
accomplished litterateur touching with versatility poetry, criticism,
history, philosophy, and still other fields, this was his hobby only,
his main work being when I knew him to make available for readers
crowding from all lands seeking information of all kinds, the
treasures of this wonderful store-house. He treated me with the
kindest courtesy, but I have no reason to feel that I was an
exception. He stood on that threshold, a welcomer of all scholars, for
his good nature was no more marked than the comprehensiveness of his
information and the dexterity with which without the least dela