IRST EDITOR.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.

(_University Magazine, April 1878._)

* * * * *

MY FIRST EDITOR.[1]

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.

_1st February, 1878._

1. In seven days more I shall be fifty-nine;--which (practically) is all
the same as sixty; but, being asked by the wife of my dear old friend,
W. H. Harrison, to say a few words of our old relations together, I find
myself, in spite of all these years, a boy again,--partly in the mere
thought of, and renewed sympathy with, the cheerful heart of my old
literary master, and partly in instinctive terror lest, wherever he is
in celestial circles, he should catch me writing bad grammar, or putting
wrong stops, and should set the table turning, or the like. For he was
inexorable in such matters, and many a sentence in "Modern Painters,"
which I had thought quite beautifully turned out after a forenoon's work
on it, had to be turned outside-in, after all, and cut into the smallest
pieces and sewn up again, because he had found out there wasn't a
nominative in it, or a genitive, or a conjunction, or something else
indispensable to a sentence's decent existence and position in life. Not
a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under
his careful eyes twice over--often also the last revises left to his
tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more.

2. "For good thirty years": that is to say, from my first verse-writing
in "Friendship's Offering" at fifteen, to my last orthodox and
conservative compositions at forty-five.[2] But when I began to utter
radical sentiments, and say things derogatory to the clergy, my old
friend got quite restive--absolutely refused sometimes to pass even my
most grammatical and punctuated paragraphs, if their contents savored of
heresy or revolution; and at last I was obliged to print all my
philanthropy and political economy on the sly.

3. The heaven of the literary world through which Mr. Harrison moved in
a widely cometary fashion, circling now round one luminary and now
submitting to the attraction of another, not without a serenely
erubescent luster of his own, differed _toto coelo_ from the celestial
state of authorship by whose courses we have now the felicity of being
dazzled and directed. Then, the publications of the months being very
nearly concluded in the modest browns of _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, and
the maje