reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated
whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
of lovely kindness for having used in my 'Venetian Life' the Briticism
'directly' for 'as soon as.'

Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which
he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be