Mr. Greeley ever received. had prevented his private griefs from affecting his public action, and people are always ready to forgive ambition as an "infirmity of noble minds," even when they do not feel disposed to reward it.

It showed with what success he

5

Unfortunately for Mr. Greeley, however, he never could. persuade himself that the public was of the same mind as the politicians regarding his personal capacity. He persisted to the last in believing himself the victim of their envy, hatred, and malice, and looking with unabated hope 10 to some opportunity of obtaining a verdict on his merits as a man of action, in which his widespread popularity and his long and laborious teachings would fairly tell. The result of the Cincinnati Convention, which his friends and emissaries from this city went out to prepare, but which perhaps 15 neither he nor they in the beginning ventured to hope for, seemed to promise him at last the crown and consummation of a life's longings, and he received it with almost childlike joy. The election was, therefore, a crushing blow. It was not, perhaps, the failure to get the presidency that was 20 hardest to bear - for this might have been accompanied by such a declaration of his fitness for the presidency as would have sweetened the remainder of his years — it was the contemptuous greatness of his opponent's majority which was killing. It dissipated the illusion of half a lifetime on the 25 one point on which illusions are dearest a man's exact place in the estimation of his countrymen. Very few — even of those whose fame rests on the most solid foundation of achievement ever ask to have this ascertained by a positive test without dread or misgiving, or face the test without a 30 strain which the nerves of old men are often ill fitted to bear. That Mr. Greeley's nerves were unequal to the shock of failure we now know. But it needed no intimate acquaintance with him to see that the card in which he announced, two days after the election, that he would thereafter be a simple 35 editor, would seek office no more, and would confine himself

to the production of a candid and judicial-minded paper, must have been written in bitterness of spirit for which this world had no balm.

In addition to the deceptions caused by his editorial influ5 ence, Mr. Greeley had others to contend with, more subtle, but not less potent. The position of the editor of a leading daily paper is one which, in our time, is hardly possible for the calmest and most candid man to fill without having his judgment of himself perverted by flattery. Our age is in10 tensely commercial; it is not the dry-goods man or the grain merchant only who has goods for sale, but the poet, the orator, the scholar, the philosopher, and the politician. We are all, in a measure, seeking a market for our wares. What we desire, therefore, above all things, is a good advertising 15 medium, or, in other words, a good means of making known to all the world where our store is and what we have to sell. This means the editor of a daily paper can furnish to anybody he pleases. He is consequently the object of unceasing adulation from a crowd of those who shrink from fighting 20 the slow and doubtful battle of life in the open field, and crave the kindly shelter of editorial plaudits, "puffs," and "mentions." He finds this adulation offered freely, and by all classes and conditions, without the least reference to his character or talents or antecedents. What wonder if it 25 turns the heads of unworthy men, and begets in them some of the vices of despots their unscrupulousness, their cruelty, and their impudence. What wonder, too, if it should have thrown off his balance a man like Mr. Greeley, whose head was not strong, whose education was imperfect, 30 and whose self-confidence had been fortified by a brave and successful struggle with adversity.

Of his many private virtues, of his kind-heartedness, his generosity, his sympathy with all forms of suffering and anxiety, we do not need to speak. His career, too, has 35 little in it to point any moral that is not already trite and familiar. The only lesson we can gather from it with any

clearness is the uncertainty of this world, and all that it contains, and the folly of seeking the presidency. Nobody can hope to follow in his footsteps. He began life as a kind of editor of which he was one of the last specimens, and which will shortly be totally extinct - the editor who fought as the 5 man-at-arms of the party. This kind of work Mr. Greeley did with extraordinary earnestness and vehemence and success so much success that a modern newspaper finally grew up around him, in spite of him, almost to his surprise, and often to his embarrassment. The changed condition of 10 journalism, the substitution of the critical for the party views of things, he never wholly accepted, and his frequent personal appearance in his columns, under the signature of "H. G.," hurling defiance at his enemies or exposing their baseness, showed how stifling he found the changed atmosphere. He 15 was fast falling behind his age when he died. New men,

and new issues, and new processes, which he either did not understand at all or only understood imperfectly, crowded upon him. If the dazzling prize of the presidency had not been held before his eyes, we should probably have witnessed 20 his gradual but certain retirement into well-won repose. Those who opposed him most earnestly must now regret sincerely that in his last hours he should have known the bitterness of believing, what was really not true, that the labors of his life, which were largely devoted to good causes, 25 had not met the appreciation they merited at the hands of his countrymen. It is for his own sake, as well as that of the public, greatly to be regretted that he should not have lived until the smoke of the late conflict had cleared away.

XIV.

E. L. GODKIN.

The Odium Philologicum.1

New York Evening Post.

OUR readers and those of The Galaxy are familiar with the controversy between Dr. Fitzedward Hall and Mr. Grant White (November, 1873). When one comes to inquire what it was all about, and why Mr. White was led to consider Dr. 5 Hall a "yahoo of literature," and "a man born without a sense of decency, one finds himself engaged in an investigation of great difficulty, but of considerable interest. The controversy between these two gentlemen by no means brings up the problem for the first time. That verbal critiIo cism, such as Mr. White has been producing for some time back, is sure to end, sooner or later, in one or more savage quarrels, is one of the most familiar facts of the literary life of our day. Indeed, so far as our observation has gone, the rule has no exceptions. Whenever we see a gentleman, no 15 matter how great his accomplishments or sweet his temper, announcing that he is about to write articles or deliver lectures on "Words and their Uses, " or on the " English of Every-day Life," or on "Familiar Faults of Conversation," or" Newspaper English," or any cognate theme, we feel all 20 but certain that we shall soon see him engaged in an encounter with another laborer in the same field, in which all dignity will be laid aside, and in which, figuratively speaking, clothes, hair, and features will suffer terribly, and out of which, unless he is very lucky, he will issue with the gravest 25 imputations resting on his character in every relation of life.

1 Reprinted by permission from Reflections and Comments. Copyright, 1895, by Chas. Scribner's Sons.

Now why is it that attempts to get one's fellowmen to talk correctly, to frame their sentences in accordance with good usage, and take their words from the best authors, have this tendency to arouse some of the worst passions of our nature, and predispose even eminent philologists-men of dainty 5 language, and soft manners, and lofty aims to assail each other in the rough vernacular of the fish-market and the forecastle? A careless observer will be apt to say that it is an ordinary result of disputation; that when men differ or argue on any subject they are apt to get angry and indulge 10 in "personalities. " But this is not true. Lawyers, for instance, live by controversy, and their controversies touch interests of the gravest and most delicate character - such as fortune and reputation; and yet the spectacle of two lawyers abusing each other in cold blood, in print, is almost 15 unknown. Currency and banking are, at certain seasons, subjects of absorbing interest, and, for the last seventy years, the discussions over them have been numerous and voluminous almost beyond example, and yet we remember no case in which a bullionist called a paper-money man bad 20 names, or in which a friend of free banking accused a restrictionist of defrauding the poor or defacing tombstones. Politics, too, home and foreign, is a fertile source of difference of opinion; and yet gross abuse, on paper, of each other, by political disputants, discussing abstract questions 25 having no present relation to power or pay, are very rare indeed.

It seems, at first blush, as if an examination of the wellknown odium theologicum, or the traditional bitterness which has been apt to characterize controversies about points of 30 doctrine, from the Middle Ages down to a period within our own memory, would throw some light on the matter. But a little consideration will show that there are special causes for the rancor of theologians for which word-criticism has no parallel. The odium theologicum was the natural and 35 inevitable result of the general belief that the holding of