reer, for the week before
commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came
back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with
the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article
in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost
every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters,
so full of _verve_ and _elan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was
always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a
Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour,
dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I
have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p.
189).

He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a
pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of
Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for
the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache
of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from
it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never
be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!"

All the world knows how he died....

PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK

(In six volumes)

The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length
finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by
those small bickerings over _minutiae_ so dear to all scrupulous
writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments
on the functions of the historian.

There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from
the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has
been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor
Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is
particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too
gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the
unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack
the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think,
has observed this.

Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very
good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of
learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too
witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said.

I w