tually
gone the length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.

The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the
Herald and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The
incident might be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if
ever a book with that title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I
never had the heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it.

III

The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said
to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements
enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and
embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is
left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.

Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of
human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that
it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I
known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.

The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been
the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were
journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news
scheme in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and
resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population.
Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the
Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses
and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length
he struck a central idea--a really great, original idea--the idea of
printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday,
fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley
and Raymond--making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate--and, at
longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill
and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist;
Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and partisan;
Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters and
affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting their
way to the front, but possessing the "nose for news," using the Bennett
formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and never
losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were
caught young by the lure