that he did not know. He outlived
the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
discoverer.

There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death
leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
knew these battles mor