nifesting his
brilliant but un-encouraged aptitudes at a very early age, came in 1872
to New York to draw for Harper's WEEKLY. Other views than this, if I
have been correctly Informed, had been entertained for his future--a
fact that provokes a smile now that his manifest destiny has been, or
is in course of being, so very neatly accomplished. The spirit of modern
aesthetics did not, at any rate, as I understand the matter, smile upon
his cradle, and the circumstance only increases the interest of his
having had from the earliest moment the clearest artistic vision.

It has sometimes happened that the distinguished draughtsman or painter
has been born in the studio and fed, as it were, from the palette, but
in the great majority of cases he has been nursed by the profane, and
certainly, on the doctrine of mathematical chances, a Philadelphia
genius would scarcely be an exception. Mr. Abbey was fortunate, however,
in not being obliged to lose time; he learned how to swim by jumping
into deep water. Even if he had not known by instinct how to draw, he
would have had to perform the feat from the moment that he found himself
attached to the "art department" of a remarkably punctual periodical.
In such a periodical the events of the day are promptly reproduced; and
with the morrow so near the day is necessarily a short one--too short
for gradual education. Such a school is not, no doubt, the ideal one,
but in fact it may have a very happy influence. If a youth is to give an
account of a scene with his pencil at a certain hour--to give it, as it
were, or perish--he will have become conscious, in the first place, of
a remarkable incentive to observe it. so that the roughness of the
foster-mother who imparts the precious faculty of quick, complete
observation is really a blessing in disguise. To say that it was simply
under this kind of pressure that Mr. Abbey acquired the extraordinary
refinement which distinguishes his work in black and white is doubtless
to say too much; but his admirers may be excused, in view of the
beautiful result, for almost wishing, on grounds of patriotism, to make
the training, or the absence of training, responsible for as much as
possible. For as no artistic genius that our country has produced is
more delightful than Mr. Abbey's, so, surely, nothing could be more
characteristically American than that it should have formed itself in
the conditions that happened to be nearest at hand, with the crowds