presented the ultimate ambition of the
aspiring American writer; but it needed a new spirit to insure its
future. What it required was the kind of editing that had suddenly made
the _Forum_ one of the greatest of English-written reviews. This is the
reason why the canny Yankee proprietors had reached over to New York and
grasped Page as quickly as the capitalists of the _Forum_ let him slip
between their fingers.

Page's sense of humour discovered a certain ironic aspect in his
position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine. The fact
that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat startling to the
placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the thing that really signified
its break with its past. But here was a Southerner firmly entrenched in
a headquarters that had long been sacred to the New England
abolitionists. One of the first sights that greeted Page, as he came
into the office, was the angular and spectacled countenance of William
Lloyd Garrison, gazing down from a steel engraving on the wall. One of
Garrison's sons was a colleague, and the anterooms were frequently
cluttered with dusky gentlemen patiently waiting for interviews with
this benefactor of their race. Page once was careless enough to inform
Mr. Garrison that "one of your niggers" was waiting outside for an
audience. "I very much regret, Mr. Page," came the answer, "that you
should insist on spelling 'Negro' with two 'g's'." Despite the mock
solemnity of this rebuke, perennial good-nature and raillery prevailed
between the son of Garrison and his disrespectful but ever sympathetic
Southern friend. Indeed, one of Page's earliest performances was to
introduce a spirit of laughter and genial cooeperation into a rather
solemn and self-satisfied environment. Mr. Mifflin, the head of the
house, even formally thanked Page "for the hearty human way in which you
take hold of life." Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the present editor of the
_Atlantic_, has described the somewhat disconcerting descent of Page
upon the editorial sanctuary of James Russell Lowell:

"Were a visitant from another sphere to ask me for the incarnation
of those qualities we love to call American, I should turn to a
familiar gallery of my memory and point to the living portrait that
hangs there of Walter Page. A sort of foursquareness, bluntness, it
seemed to some; an uneasy, often explosive energy; a disposition to
underrate fine drawn nicenesses o