t, James Gordon
Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and
might have been regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him
out of New York and made him the greater part of his life a resident of
Paris, where I was wont to meet and know much of him.

The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity,
prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in
Ireland "absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described
himself as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a
"despot" of course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good
husband and the head of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married
the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never
ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in his will a handsome
legacy.

Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his
familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad,
naturally we fell occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he
once said, "if you owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay
in New York and edit it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me
what I think you ought to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about
the size of it."

"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would
send for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John
Young, and put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go
and lose myself in the wilds of Africa."

He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was
still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a
year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service.
John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum"
when a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an
invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the
quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is
Young gone mad," I said to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the
one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or
forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"

The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a _cause celebre_ when John
Young was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its
Washington correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between
an editor and a Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had ac