ve preferred to turn his
attention to biography and literary criticism. But he promptly resolved
to disregard the warnings of pedants and to be a man of letters
_though_ a professor of history and politics. I well remember the
irritation, sometimes amused and sometimes angry, with which he used to
speak of those who were persuaded that scholarship was in some way
contaminated by the touch of imagination or philosophy. He at least
would run the risk. And so he set himself to work cultivating the graces
of style no less assiduously than the exactness of science. There is a
distinct filiation in his diction, by which, from Stevenson to Lamb and
from Lamb to Sir Thomas Browne, one can trace it back to the quaint old
prose writers of the seventeenth century. I remember his calling my
attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic
qualities of those worthies. Many of his colors are from their
ink-horns, in which the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he
is sententious and didactic he seems to have caught something of
Emerson's manner. And indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of
optimism and a slightly dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and
persuasive, tone which he has in common with the New England sage.

But in spite of all these resemblances to older authors, Mr. Wilson
gives proof in his style of a masterful independence. He is constantly
determined to think for himself, to get to the bottom of his subject,
and finally to express the matter in terms of his own personality.
Especially is this evident in his early works, where he struggles
manfully to be himself, even in the choice of words and phrases,
weighing and analyzing the most current idioms and often making in them
some thoughtful alteration the better to express his exact meaning. His
literary training appears to have been almost wholly English. There are
few traces in his writings of any classical reading or of any first-hand
acquaintance with French, German, or Italian authors. And indeed in the
substance of his thought I wonder if he is sufficiently hospitable to
foreign ideas, especially to the vast body of comment on the French
Revolution. I imagine few Continental authorities would agree with him
in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of that great
movement, which he seems to regard with almost unmitigated disapproval.

In Mr. Wilson's addresses and public letters concerning the War he
re-affirms his princip