ity and force into
the detail of his work. The _World_, and particularly the Sunday
_World_, which was the foundation of the Sunday newspaper, the New
York illustrated _Graphic_, the _Round Table_, and other journals were
built up by his energy, and owed their most striking and successful
features to his suggestiveness. He was particularly unselfish in his
estimate of other men and his appreciation of their work. He was as
proud of discovering the good qualities of a man on his staff as a
miner of finding a nugget, and never wearied of expatiating upon them.
Indeed, he did this more than once to his own disadvantage, thus
furnishing an instrument to treachery.

I am sure the "boys" of the old _World_ staff, St. Clair McKelway,
A.C. Wheeler ("Nym Crinkle"), T.E. Wilson, H.G. Crickmore, Montgomery
Schuyler, E.C. Stedman, and others, will look back with a little sigh
for the "old times," and for the generous recognition they received
from one who was never at a loss for a subject, or for the treatment
of a topic, and was always a good comrade and heart and soul
sympathizer in their work, its trials and its achievements.

A chief quality with Mr. Croly was faithfulness to the interests he
served. This was put to some severe tests; but they could not be
called temptations, for disloyalty did not present itself as a
possibility to him. His faults were those of a nervous temperament,
combined with great intellectual force and a strength of feeling which
in some directions and under certain circumstances became prejudice.
He could never, in any case, be made to run a machine. He hated the
obvious way of saying or doing a thing. He cultivated the "unexpected"
almost to a fault, and always gave a touch of originality even to the
commonplace. His pessimistic and unhopeful temperament was doubtless
due to inherent and hereditary bodily weakness, and to the lack of
muscular cultivation in his youth, which might have modified inherent
tendencies. His mental lack was form not force; and he had enough
original elemental ideas to have supplied a dozen men. In that respect
he was superior to every other journalist I have ever known--not
excepting Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond and Frederick Hudson.

But the time has gone by for ideas. It is not that they are a drug in
the market, but that there is no market for them. To-day is the
apotheosis of the commonplace, the iteration of the cries of the
street, the gabble of the sidewalk, an