Would it pay to provide such? or to have one die made and sell the gilt imprints on crimson (?) leather which could be glued on to the other side of the cover? I visited the new Harvard House1 here yesterday. It is lovely within and without. I am hoping my son will have an inspiration to change one line of his feeling verses before they get into print. I liked them for what they refrained from containing all boastfulness, even the name of Harvard. I thought no Yale man could have written thus.

August 8, 1894.

I find that the Post has made very exhaustive arrangements for the Bryant centennial,2 and expects to leave very little for the morning papers to pick. up; so your proposition confines itself to the Nation, and I can manage if I receive the MS. on Monday, August 20, though I might not be able to let you see a proof.

A page would suit me better than a page and a half, but I could stand the latter if necessary (say three thousand words). You can hardly attempt a report, but may give some report of the weight of the invited guests and of the local feeling, and add what pictur

1 New York Harvard Club house, 29 West 44th Street; formally opened June 12, 1894. Lloyd McK. Garrison's poem is printed in the H. G. M. for September, 1894, vol. iii, p. 27.

2 Celebration of W. C. Bryant's Centennial at Cummington, Massachusetts, on August 16, 1894.

esqueness you can.

tennial?

Is this not our first poetic cen

1

November 9, 1894.

Your congratulations are highly appreciated. The problem in this city was really to crush the Republican Machine, the Democratic being hopelessly Tammany. The red herring of national party politics being removed, there was a straight issue between thieves and honest men, who happily outnumber the thieves. The latter we shall have with us always. Whether the Committee of Seventy and the Good Government Clubs can definitively suppress the Republican Machine, the future must decide.

2

December 10, 1894.

The H. G. M. (these letters somehow always remind me of the Grand Old Man) has not yet come to hand. I will work prayerfully at the article you mention. I am firm in the faith that President Harper of Chicago must be put down. He would cling to the inter at all hazards. I am for collegiate (home) athletics only.

February 16, 1895.

3

Herewith I redeem my promise to you. Yesterday I had a line from Prof. Fiske, whose library and villa

1 On the New York City election.

2 On intercollegiate athletics.

3

3 W. P. G. had promised some letters of introduction.

will enchant you. I learn that he and Charles Dudley Warner are planning a tour of Spain in June.

The football article is very sensible and encouraging. It lacks only the recommendation that intercollegiate athletics be abolished. That is the stronghold of kindergarten fanaticism, as I call the present rage for athletics.

February 18, 1895.

It is very kind of you to offer to serve me in Italy. I have a standing Venetian commission, but unhappily I have mislaid the precise information necessary for the execution of it. The house in which Rousseau lived a palazzo, I believe while he was attaché to the French embassy, has been discovered, and a photograph of it (or identification of it in existing photographs) would much please me. It is just possible that the librarians or the photographers in Venice know the building and could help me to a view of it. Further than such inquiry, pray take no trouble; and I must reimburse you for any expense. As a preparation for Gibraltar, do re-read Woodberry's fine sonnets in Crandall's collection.

1

June 19, 1895.

You cannot be very far from home as I write, and it will please you to take up this week's Nation and 1 First printed in the Atlantic Monthly.

find your Leopardi letter.1 This on Venice, which I regret to return, takes me into dangerous quicksands. Needless to say that I sympathize entirely with you in your abhorrence of gross art, but I must steer clear of reopening the old controversy between lay and expert opinion — in art as in other matters. Grossness I believe to be but a passing phase in art or in literature, as in the drama. Protest and avoidance are necessary, but a poor editor has to consider the mode of it and the possible utility of it, and how much space he can afford for rejoinder and surrejoinder.

Mme. Mario has written in a vein which shows that she felt positively obliged for your visit, and the opportunity it gave her of showing her good-will to me. I presume that you missed Carducci, and surely that was a pity.

I am extremely obliged to you for the pains you took in Venice over my little Rousseau commission. I presume I have somewhere the title of the book you recovered for me, but my notes are somewhat disorderly. Another occasion for securing the photograph will arise, no doubt.

3

June 29, 1895.

I thank you for your Placet in the matter of my degree, and as for my needy knife-grinder biography 1 "Leopardi's Home," printed in the Nation, June 20, 1895. 2 A criticism of the International Exhibition of Paintings at Venice.

3 9 At Commencement, June 26, Harvard conferred the honorary

you shall have it directly. I was too embarrassed when standing up to be decorated to catch the sense of President Eliot's compliment, and as these little jeux d'esprit are never printed, I am likely to make no more than a rough guess that my thirty years' labors on the Nation seemed worthy of recognition.

The President's allusion at the Commencement dinner to the Nation as a controversial journal, I think quite missed fire, whether considered as a happy (summary) epithet, or as enlightenment to the audience, nine tenths of whom had not been in Sanders Theatre.

In the Commencement haystack it is no wonder we eluded each other, but you had the advantage of seeing me. My turn will come some day.

August 5, 1895.

I made a spurt yesterday and finished Mme. Mario's "Nicotera," and now send it to you with my compliments. On the whole she makes him an attractive figure, and gives much documentary evidence from which the reader can judge for himself. Still, her Garibaldian affection may tinge her view at least of the later Nicotera, and I enclose Stillman's 1 degree of Master of Arts on W. P. G. President Eliot characterized him "hominem integerrumum, qui triginta per annos aut multa de rebus civilibus et de vita populi Americani luculente scripsit aut aliorum scripta edenda curavit."

1 W. J. Stillman.