of personal bereavement. For a generation we have enjoyed with him an intimacy characterized by utter frankness and entire mutual esteem through all vicissitudes of opinion; enlivened by constant intercourse by letter, in connection with that attached and cordial collaboration which has lent so much weight to the reviews of this journal; and refreshed by visits, "alas! too few," in his annual east-westward journey. In a time of decadence we feel keenly the loss of one who threw all his weight in the scale of that elder Americanism which, to look only at his own State, has undergone so woeful a substitution

for Chase, and Giddings, and Wade, for Hayes and Garfield, of Grosvenor and Foraker, of McKinley and Hanna.

SAMUEL E. SEWALL1

By his first name, the subject of this brief biography proclaimed himself a descendant of Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, of honored memory. His middle name, Edmund, as unmistakably betrayed his Quincy blood. His cousin, Samuel Joseph May, bore two Sewall names. Through Elizabeth Walley (Mrs. Tiffany does not mention the interesting fact) Mr. Sewall's line blended with that of Wendell Phillips. The part played by these Boston kinsmen - Sewall, May, Phillips, and Edmund Quincy in the small beginnings of the anti-slavery enterprise, and in its subsequent mighty propaganda to the end, is known to all readers of the Life of Garrison. Mr. Sewall was the least conspicuous of the four admirable and gifted spirits, and was the shyest and most shrinking; but the great orator had not more fire, nor Garrison himself more constancy, while his liberality was as judicious as it was incessant. As a lawyer of high standing he rendered peculiar services to the cause in drafting anti-slavery measures or in helping rescue the fugitive; and this professional talent he

1 Samuel E. Sevall: A Memoir. By Nina Moore Tiffany. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898. From the Nation, December 8, 1898, vol. 67, p. 434.

concurrently applied to the amelioration of the laws affecting the status of women.

If Mr. Sewall inherited from Anne Bradstreet his disposition to poetize (privately), so that his first wife could address him as "Dearest and best beloved of poets"; and from the Chief Justice, author of "The Selling of Joseph," his anti-slavery instinct and mandate, he borrowed nothing of Samuel Sewall the diarist. Mrs. Tiffany has found her material but scanty no great store of letters even; and her additions to what was already accessible in print are chiefly in the province of the rights, not of man, but of woman. She enables one to comprehend, however, the mixture of radicalism and conservatism, modesty and courage, womanly tenderness and manly initiative, censure and toleration, which marked this genuine philanthropist. The last-named quality is nowhere better shown than in his relations to Mr. Garrison. To the founding and early support of the Liberator Mr. Sewall was indispensable; yet he disliked the name of the paper, and (as his biographer would have done well to remind her readers) proposed for it the Safety-Lamp. In the organization of the first immediate-abolition society, Mr. Sewall shrank from the doctrine which was to distinguish sharply the new from the older and ineffective movements. He was on the committee with Garrison to draft its constitution, and his Aunt Robie reported

that "Mr. Garrison troubles them considerably, he is so furious." Mr. Sewall would not sign the preamble as agreed upon, yet soon consented to become one of the board of managers. This was not fickleness, but progress in conviction. Mr. Garrison's method was not his, but he desired the same thing, and he respected the pioneer. While he was still generously contributing to the support of the Liberator, and when the paper was only four months old, he wrote (April, 1831) deploring the “violent and abusive language which he (the editor) is constantly pouring out,... . . calling all slaveholders thieves and robbers, declaring that no slaveholder can be a Christian, and accusing every one who does not think exactly as he does of wilful blindness and want of principle. Notwithstanding all this, his paper is doing good." Twenty-nine years afterwards, Mr. Sewall criticised himself in even stronger terms for a speech made at a Thaddeus Hyatt meeting in New York in May, 1860:

"Though much that I said is omitted (in Herald and Tribune), and much inaccurately and imperfectly reported, yet they have taken pains to put in two blackguardisms very exactly, one calling the Senate a most contemptible body,' the other calling (Senator) 'Mason a wretch.' These expressions slipped out by accident. I do not believe there is any use in such abuse. More effect would

be given to the same charges if expressed in milder terms."

Mr. Sewall did not share the Garrisonian scruples about political action under a pro-slavery Constitution, but neither did he withdraw his support or name or steadfast coöperation from the animating moral enterprise. Still less did he make a fetish of party. He lived to cast his vote for Cleveland against Blaine, and to justify it in a fine letter here reproduced. He was a familiar figure at the State House in Boston, where he had been Senator in the Free-Soil coalition days. His last appearance there was in the spring of 1888, when he went before the Judiciary Committee with six bills to equalize the descent of real estate and of personal property between husband and wife, and the custody of minor children; to legalize conveyances, gifts, and contracts between them; to provide for testamentary guardians for wives as well as widows; and to repeal the act limiting the right of married women to dispose of real estate by will. He and his fellow petitioners had summary leave to withdraw, but the rebuff had no discouragement for him, whose heart was as light as his step. His last words bespoke his cheerful purpose to confront the Legislature again with the same measures at their next session; but (he was in his ninetieth year) death now gave him his well-earned leave to withdraw.