or at all
liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I
had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about
many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the
Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped
himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had
fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps
through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
great distinction.

It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of
Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
had the heart to say of the Mysteries,