To-day with jollity let us turn the water of our common lives into the wine of sweet domestic happiness; let us take the children of misfortune to our breast; let us be loyal to our weaker friends; let us share our fullness with our brethren who are lean in this world's goods, and, shedding smiles and kind words, and pleasant phrases through the day, it may be that some stricken heart made glad may say: "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by."
BASIL W. DUKE
General Basil Wilson Duke, historian of Morgan's men, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, May 28, 1838. He was educated at Georgetown and Centre Colleges, after which he studied law at Transylvania University.
He was admitted to the bar, in 1858, and entered upon the practice at St. Louis. In 1861 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature; and in June of that year he married the sister of John Hunt Morgan and enlisted in Morgan's command. Upon Morgan's death, in 1864, General Duke succeeded him as leader of the band. After the war he settled at Louisville, Kentucky, as a lawyer, and that city is his home today. From 1875 to 1880 General Duke was commonwealth's attorney for the Fifth Judicial District; and since 1895 he has been a commissioner of Shiloh Military Park. His _Morgan's Cavalry_ (Cincinnati, 1867; New York, 1906), is the authoritative biography of the noted partisan leader and history of his intrepid band. General Duke was one of the editors of _The Southern Bivouac_, a Louisville magazine, from 1885 to 1887. His _History of the Bank of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1895), filled a gap in Kentucky history; and his _Reminiscences_ (New York, 1911), was a delightful volume of enormous proportions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky_ (Chicago, 1897); _The Bookman_ (December, 1907).
MORGAN, THE MAN
[From _Morgan's Cavalry_ (Cincinnati, 1867)]
General Morgan had more of those personal qualities which make a man's friends devoted to him than any one I have ever known. He was himself very warm and constant in the friendships which he formed. It seemed impossible for him to do enough for those to whom he was attached, or to ever give them up. His manner, when he wished, prepossessed every one in his favor. He was generally more courteous and attentive to his inferiors than to his equals and superiors. This may have proceeded in a great measure from his jealousy of dictation and impatience of restraint, but was the result also of warm and generous feeling. His greatest faults arose out of his kindness and easiness of disposition, which rendered it impossible for him to say or do unpleasant things, unless when under the influence of strong prejudice or resentment.
This temperament made him a too lax disciplinarian, and caused him to be frequently imposed upon. He was exceedingly and unfeignedly modest.
For a long time he sought, in every way, to avoid the applause and ovations which met him everywhere in the South, and he never learned to keep a bold countenance when receiving them.
His personal appearance and carriage were striking and graceful. His features were eminently handsome and adapted to the most pleasing expressions. His eyes were small, of a grayish blue color, and their glances keen and thoughtful. His figure on foot or on horseback was superb. He was exactly six feet in height, and although not at all corpulent, weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. His form was perfect and the rarest combination of strength, activity, and grace.
His constitution seemed impervious to the effects of privation and exposure, and it was scarcely possible to perceive that he suffered from fatigue or lack of sleep.
Men are not often born who can wield such an influence as he exerted, apparently without an effort; who can so win men's hearts and stir their blood. He will, at least, be remembered until the Western cavalrymen and their children have all died. The bold riders who lived in the border-land, whose every acre he made historic, will leave many a story of his audacity and wily skill.
HENRY WATTERSON
Henry Watterson, the foremost Kentucky journalist, and one of the most widely known newspaper men in the United States, was born at Washington, D. C., February 16, 1840. This accident of birth was due to the fact that his father, Harvey McGee Watterson, with his wife, was in Washington as a member of the lower house of Congress from his native state, Tennessee. In consequence of defective vision, Henry Watterson was educated by private tutors; but he did attend the Episcopal School at Philadelphia for a short time. At the age of eighteen years he became a reporter on the Washington _States_; but, in 1861, he returned to Nashville, Tennessee, to edit the _Republican Banner_. Watterson was a staff officer in the Confederate Army, and in 1864 chief of scouts for General Joseph E. Johnston, but throughout the war he was also editing a newspaper. After the war he married and revived the _Banner_, which he edited for about two years, when he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the _Journal_. In the following year Watterson, with Walter N. Haldeman, consolidated the _Journal_, _Courier_, and _Daily Democrat_ to form _The Courier-Journal_. The first issue of this paper appeared November 8, 1868, and Colonel Watterson has been its editor ever since. He has made it the greatest newspaper in Kentucky, if not in the South or West, and one of the best known papers printed in the English language. His editorials are unequalled by any other writer in America, either from the point of thought or construction; and his style is always more interesting than his substance. Colonel Watterson has held but one public office, having been a member of the Forty-fourth Congress, in 1876, and the personal friend and most ardent supporter of Samuel J.
Tilden in the infamous Hayes-Tilden controversy of that year. Colonel Watterson has been a delegate-at-large from Kentucky in many Democratic presidential conventions, in all of which bodies he has been a conspicuous figure. He is famous as a journalist, orator, and author.
His eulogy upon Abraham Lincoln has been listened to in almost every state in the Union, and it is his best known effort in oratory. Though now past his three score years and ten, Colonel Watterson is as vigorous and vindictive as ever in the handling of public questions and of his legion of enemies, as the country witnessed in the presidential campaign of 1912. He edited _Oddities of Southern Life and Character_ (Boston, 1882); and he has written _The History of the Spanish-American War_ (Louisville, 1898); _The Compromises of Life: Lectures and Addresses_ (New York, 1902), containing his ablest speeches delivered upon many occasions; and _Old London Town_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1911), a group of his European letters to _The Courier-Journal_, edited by Joseph Fort Newton. Colonel Watterson has an attractive country home near Louisville, "Mansfield," but in recent years his winters have been spent at Naples-on-the-Gulf, in Florida, and his summers in "grooming presidential candidates!"
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (February, 1904); _Harper's Weekly_ (November 12, 1904); _The Booklovers Magazine_ (March, 1905).
OLD LONDON TOWN[26]
[From _Old London Town, and Other Travel Sketches_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1910)]
London, less than any of the great capitals of the world--even less than Berlin--has changed its aspects in the last four decades of alteration and development. During the Second Empire, and under the wizard hand of Baron Hauseman, a new Paris sprang into existence. We know what has happened in New York and Chicago. But London, except the Thames Embankment and the opening of a street here and there betwixt the City and the West End--the mid-London of Soho and the Strand--is very much the London I became acquainted with nearly forty years ago. To be sure many of the ancient landmarks, such as Temple Bar, the Cock and the Cheshire Cheese, have gone to the ash heap of the forgotten, whilst some imposing hostelries have risen in the region about Trafalgar Square; but, in the main, the biggest village of Christendom has lost none of its familiar earmarks, so that the exile set down anywhere from Charing Cross and Picadilly Circus to the bustling region of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, blindfold, would, the instant the bandage were removed from his eyes, exclaim, "It is London!"
Yes, it is London; the same old London; the same old cries in the street; the same old whitey-brown atmosphere; even the same old Italian organ-grinders, the tunes merely a trifle varied. Nor yet without its charm, albeit to me of a rather ghostly, reminiscental sort. I came here in 1866, with a young wife and a roll of ambitious manuscript, found work to do and a publisher, lived for a time in the clouds of two worlds, that of Bohemia, of which the Savage Club was headquarters, and that of the New Apocalypse of Science which eddied about the School of Mines in Jermyn Street and the _Fortnightly Review_, then presided over by George Henry Lewes, my nearest friend and sponsor the late Professor Huxley. I alternated my days and nights between a somewhat familiar intimacy with Spencer and Tyndall and a wholly familiar intimacy with Tom Robertson and Andrew Halliday. Artemus Ward was in London and it was to him that I owed these later associations. Sir Henry Irving had not made his mark. Sir Charles Wyndham was still in America. There were Keenes and Kembles yet upon the stage. Charles Matthews ruled the roost of Comedy. George Eliot was in the glory of her powers and her popularity. Thackeray was gone, but Charles Dickens lived and wrote.
Bulwer-Lytton lived and wrote. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade vied with one another for current favor. Modern Frenchification had invaded neither the restaurants nor the music halls. Evans's Coffee House (Pendennis core of Harmony) prevailed after midnight in Covent Garden Market. In short, the solidarities of Old England, along with its roast, succulent, abundant and intact.
To me London was Mecca. The look of it, the very smell of it, was inspiration. Incidentally--I don't mind saying--there were some cakes and ale. The nights were jolly enough down in the Adelphi, where the barbarians of the Savage Club held high revel, and George Augustus Sala was Primate, and Edmund Yates and Tom Robertson were High Priests. Temple Bar blocked the passage from Belgravia to the Bank of England, and there was no Holborn Viaduct nor Victorian Embankment.
Aye, long ago! How far away it seems, and how queer! To me it was the London of story-books; of Whittington and his cat and Goody Two-Shoes and the Canterbury Shades; of Otway and Marlowe and Chatterton; of Nell Gwynne and Dick Steele and poor Goldsmith; of all that was bizarre and fanciful in history, that was strange and romantic in legend; and not the London of the Tower, the Museum and Westminster Abbey; not the London of Cremorne Gardens, newly opened, nor the Argyle Rooms, which should have been burned to the ground before they were opened at all.
Since then I have been in and out of London many times. I have been amused here and bored here; but give me back my old fool's paradise and I shall care for naught else.
One may doubt which holds him closest, the London of History or the London of Fiction, or that London which is a mingling of both, and may be called simply the London of Literature, in which Oliver Goldsmith carouses with Tom Jones, and Harry Fielding discusses philosophy with the Vicar of Wakefield, where Nicholas Nickleby makes so bold as to present himself to Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and to ask his intercession in favor of a poor artist, the son of a hairdresser of the name of Turner in Maiden Lane, and even where "Boz," as he passes through Longacre, is tripped up by the Artful Dodger, and would perchance fall upon the siding if not caught in the friendly arms of Sir Richard Steele on his way to pay a call upon the once famous beauty, the Lady Beatrix Esmond.
But yesterday I strolled into Mitre Court, and threading my way through the labyrinth of those dingy old law chambers known as the Middle and Inner Temple, found myself in the little graveyard of the Temple Church and by the side of the grave of Oliver Goldsmith. Though less than a stone's throw from Fleet Street and the Strand, the place is quiet enough, only a faint hum of wheels penetrating the cool precincts and gloomy walls. There, beneath three oblong slabs, put together like an outer stone coffin, lies the most richly endowed of all the vagabonds, with the simple but sufficient legend:
"Here lies Oliver Goldsmith, "Born Nov. 10th, 1728. Died April 4th, 1774."
to tell a story which for all its vagrancy and folly, is somewhat dear to loving hearts. He died leaving many debts and a few friends. He lived a lucky-go-devil, who could squander in a night of debauch more than he could earn in a month of labor. Yet he gave us the good Primrose and _The Deserted Village_ and _The Traveler_, and many a care-dispelling screed beside.
The Frenchman would say "his destiny." The less fanciful Briton, "his temperament." Poor Noll! He seemed to know himself fairly well in spite of his dissipations and his vanity, and he sleeps sound enough now, perhaps as soundly as the rest of those who in life held him in a rather equivocal admiration and affectionate contempt. There are a few other tombs--an effigy or two--round about, the weird old Chapel of the Templars, shut in by great walls from the streets beyond, to keep them solemn company. For Goldsmith, at least, there seems a fitness; for his life, and such labor as he did, eddied round these sad precincts. Nigh at hand was the Mitre tavern, across the way the Cock, and down the street the Cheshire Cheese. Without the Vandal has been busy enough, within all remains as it was the day they buried him. Perhaps he was not a desirable visiting acquaintance. I dare say he was rather a trying familiar friend. Pen-craft and purse-making are often wide apart. The charm of authorship ends in most cases upon the printed page. The man carries his sentiment in a globule of ink and it evaporates by exposure to the atmosphere of the world of action. The song of Dickens died by its own fireside. Kipling, for all his word-painting, is hardly a miracle of grace. Why should one wish to have known Goldsmith, or grudge him his place by the side of the great old Doctor, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Garrick? He lived his own life, and, though it was not very clean and wholly unprosperous, perhaps he enjoyed it. He left us some rich fruitage dangling over a wall, which may well conceal all else. Of the dead, no ill! Their faults to the past. The rest to Eternity!
Gradually, but surely, a new London is showing itself above the debris of the old. Miles of roundabout are reduced by short cuts. Thoroughfares are ruthlessly cut through sacred precincts and landmarks obliterated to make room for imposing edifices and widened streets. In the end, London will be rebuilt to rival Paris in the splendor, without the uniformity of its architecture. The grime will, of course, attach itself in time to the modern city as it did in the ancient, so that the London that is to be will grow old to the coming generations as the London that was grew old to the generations that went before.
"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow Creeps on this petty pace from day to day, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death."
Ever and ever the old times, the dear old times! Were they really any better than these? I don't think so--we only fancy them so. They had their displacements. It was then, as now, "eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die," life the same old walking shadow, the same old play, or, lagging superfluous, or laughing his hour upon the stage and seen no more, the same old
"... tale told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
Somehow, London has a tendency to call up such reflections; sombre, serious itself, to provoke moralizing, albeit a turmoil, with incessant flashes of light and shade, the contrasts the vividest and most precipitate on earth, deep and penetrating, even from Hyde Park corner to St. Martins-in-the-Field, and on eastward beyond the Tower and into the purlieus of Whitechapel and the solitudes of Bethnal Green.
FOOTNOTE:
[26] Copyright, 1910, by The Torch Press.
GILDEROY W. GRIFFIN
Gilderoy Wells Griffin, essayist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 6, 1840, the son of a merchant. He was educated in the University of Louisville, and admitted to the bar just as he attained his majority.
He soon became private secretary for George D. Prentice, and this pointed his path from law to letters. Griffin was dramatic critic of the Louisville _Journal_ until after Prentice's death; and his first book was a biographical study of the great editor. His _Studies in Literature_ (Baltimore, 1870), a small group of essays, was followed by the final edition of _Prenticeana_ (Philadelphia, 1871), which he revised and to which he also contributed a new sketch of Prentice.
Griffin was appointed United States Consul to Copenhagen, in 1871. His _Memoir of Col. Charles S. Todd_ (Philadelphia, 1872), was an excellent piece of writing. The most tangible result of his sojourn in Copenhagen was _My Danish Days_ (1875), one of the most delightful of his works. In Denmark his most intimate friend, perhaps, was Hans Christian Anderson.
His _A Visit to Stratford_ (1875), was worth while. The year following its publication, Griffin was transferred to a similar position in the Samoan Islands, and he left in manuscript a work on the Islands which has never been published. In 1879 Griffin was again transferred, this time being sent to Aukland, New Zealand, where he remained until 1884; and the time of his departure witnessed the appearance of his last work, _New Zealand: Her Commerce and Resources_ (Wellington, N. Z., 1884).
President Arthur sent him as consul to Sydney, which post he held for seven years. Griffin's death occurred while he was visiting his old home, Louisville, Kentucky, October 21, 1891. His brother was the step-father of the famous Mary Anderson, the former actress, and she has a goodly word for the memory of Griffin in her autobiography. He was a patron of the drama, a faithful and far-seeing diplomat, and a very able writer. His wife, Alice M. Griffin, published a volume of _Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1864).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (October 22, 1891); _A Few Memories_, by Mary Anderson de Navarro (London, 1896).
THE GYPSIES
[From _Studies in Literature_ (Baltimore, 1870)]