American writers owed their
correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest
were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it
was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost
always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look
back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the
errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover
mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that
attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I
forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.

Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her
only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I
cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very
motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the
person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady
Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.

In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
differentiation of the New England type which was not less
characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it
piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He
must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in
this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages