But a little later, when Marat, "the Friend of Man," was stricken down, a voice rose in the Convention, "Where art thou, David?" And again, responding to the call, he painted the picture of the dead demagogue lying in his bath, his pen in hand, a half-written screed on a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that painting was not a plaything.

Born August 21, 1748, a man over fifty years of age when this century commenced, David may yet be considered entirely our own; for the ideas of his country, despite minor influences that have affected modern art, have prevailed in the art of all other countries, and these principles were largely formulated by him. France has been throughout this century the only country which has steadfastly encouraged art, with a system of education unsurpassed in any epoch, and by the maintenance of a standard which, however rebellious at times, every serious artist has been and is obliged to acknowledge. A cousin—or, as some authorities have it, a grand-nephew—of Boucher (the artist who best typifies the frivolity of the art of the eighteenth century, so that there is grim humor in the thought that this iconoclast was of his blood), David was twenty-seven years of age when, in 1775, he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to go to Italy for four years at the expense of the government. He was the pupil of Vien, a painter whose chief merit it was to have inspired his pupil with a hatred of the frivolous Pompadour art of the epoch; and David only obtained the coveted prize after competing five successive years. It is instructive to learn that of this first sojourn at Rome almost nothing remains in the way of painting; for the young artist, endowed with the patience which is, according to Goethe, synonomous with genius, devoted all his time to drawing from the antique.

It was here and during this time, doubtless, that he formed his conviction that painting of the highest type must conform to classical tradition—that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration of his time and by which he thought to be remembered, but on the portraits which, with his mastery of technical acquirement, he painted with surprising truth and reality.

The time was propitious, however, for David. France, the seeds of revolution germinating in its soil, looked upon the Republic of Rome as the type from which a system could be evolved that would usher in a new day of virtuous government; and when, after a second visit to Rome, David returned home with a picture representing the oath of the Horatii, Paris received him with open arms. The picture was exhibited, and viewed by crowds, burning, doubtless, in their turn to have weapons placed in their hands with which to conquer their liberties. This was in 1786; but years after, in the catalogue of the Salon of 1819, we read this note: "The Oath of the Horatii, the first masterpiece which restored to the French school of painting the purity of antique taste."

At the outbreak of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque, and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life—paradoxically enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. His wife—who had left him at the outset of his political life, horrified at the excesses of the time—now rejoined him in his misfortune; and inspired by her devotion, David made the first sketch of the Sabine women.

Released from prison October 26, 1795, he returned to his art; and in 1800 the Sabines was exhibited in a room in the Louvre, where it remained for more than five years, during which time it constantly attracted visitors, and brought to the painter in entrance fees more than thirteen thousand dollars. Early in the career of Napoleon, David had attracted his attention; and he had vainly endeavored to induce the artist to accompany him on the Egyptian campaign. On the accession of Napoleon as Emperor, therefore, we find in the Salon catalogues, "Monsieur David, first painter to his Imperial Majesty," in place of plain "Citizen David" of the Revolutionary years.

Napoleon ordered from David four great paintings. The Coronation and the Distribution of Flags alone were painted when the overthrow of the Empire, and the loyalty of David to his imperial patron, caused him to be exiled in 1816. He went to Brussels, where, on December 29, 1825, he died. The Bourbons, masters of France, refused to allow his body to be brought back to his country; but Belgium gave him a public funeral, after which he was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Brussels.



This dominant artistic influence of France in the first quarter of this century is not entirely extinguished to-day. The classical spirit has never been entirely absent from any intellectual manifestation of the French; but in David and his pupils it was carried to an extremity against which the painters of the next generation were to struggle almost hopelessly. Time, which sets all things right, has placed David in his proper place; and while to-day we may admire the immense knowledge of the man as manifested in the great classical pictures, like the Horatii, the Sabines, or the Leonidas at Thermopylae, we remain cold before their array of painted statues. His portraits—Marat, the charming sketch of Madame Recamier, his own portrait as a young man, the group of Michel Gerard and his family, and the Pope Pius VII.—give the touch of nature which is needed to kindle the fire of humanity in this man of iron.



It is as though nature had wished a contrast to this coldly intellectual type that there should have existed at the same time a painter who, seeking at the same inexhaustible fountain-head of classicism, found inspiration for an art almost morbid in excess of sentiment. Pierre Prud'hon was born at Cluny in Burgundy, April 4, 1758, the son of a poor mason who, dying soon after the boy's birth, left him to the care of the monks of the Abbey of Cluny. The pictures decorating the monastery visibly affecting the youth, the Bishop of Macon placed him under the tuition of one Desvoges, who directed the school of painting at Dijon. Here his progress was rapid, but at nineteen the too susceptible youth married a woman whose character and habits were such that his life was rendered unhappy thenceforward.

In 1780 Prud'hon went to Paris to prosecute his studies; and there, two years after, was awarded a prize, founded by his province, which enabled him to go to Rome. It is characteristic of the man that, in the competition for this prize, he was so touched by the despair of one of his comrades competing with him that he repainted completely his friend's picture—with such success that it was the friend to whom the prize was awarded, and who, but for a tardy awakening of conscience, would have gone to Rome in his place.

The judgment rectified, Prud'hon went to Rome, where he stayed seven years, studying Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and above all Correggio, whose influence is manifest in his work, and returned to Paris in 1789. Unknown, and timid by nature, he attracted little attention, and for some years gained his living by designing letter-heads, visiting cards, which were then of an ornate description, and the many trifles which constitute a present resource to the unsuccessful painter even to-day.



It was not until 1796 that some of the charming drawings which he had made commenced to attract attention. A series of designs illustrating Daphnis and Chloe, for the publishing house of Didot aine, were particularly noticeable; and through this work he made the acquaintance of M. Frochot, by whose influence he received a commission for a decoration for the palace of St. Cloud, which is now placed in the Louvre.



Life now became somewhat easier, and in 1803—having long been separated from his wife—a talented young woman, Mlle. Mayer, became his pupil, and relations of a more tender character were established. The pictures of Mlle. Mayer are influenced by her master to a degree that makes them minor productions of his own; and her unselfish, though unconsecrated, devotion to him makes up the sum of the little happiness which he may have had.

In 1808 Prud'hon's picture of Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime was ordered for the Palace of Justice, and was shown at the Salon of that year, where the presence of David's Sabines and its influence as shown in many of the productions of his pupils were not enough to rob Prud'hon of a legitimate success, and the cross of the Legion of Honor was accorded him. The Assumption of the Virgin was exhibited in 1819; but before that Prud'hon had been made a member of the Institute, and (it passed for a distinction) drawing-master to the Empress Marie Louise.

Many pictures, all characterized by a subtile charm, were produced during this happy period; but in 1821 Mlle. Mayer, preyed upon by her false position, committed suicide, and Prud'hon lingered in continual sorrow until February 16, 1823, when he died. The work of Prud'hon covers a wide range, of which not the least important are the drawings which he made with a lavish hand. As has been observed, he was a true child of his time, and the classic influence is strongly felt in his work; but translated through his temperament, it is no longer lifeless and cold. It is eloquent of the early ages of the world, when life was young and maturity and age bore the impress of a simple life, little perplexed by intricate problems of existence. Throughout his work, in the recreation of the myths of antiquity or in the rarer representation of Christian legend, his style is sober and dignified—as truly classic as that of David; but permeating it all is the indescribable essence of beauty and youth, the reflection, undoubtedly, of a man who, rarely fortunate, capable of grave mistakes, has nevertheless left much testimony to the love and esteem in which he was held.

Francois Gerard, one of the many faithful followers of David, was born May 4, 1770, at Rome, where his father had gone in the service of the ambassador of France. He went to France in his twelfth year, and at sixteen was enrolled in the school of David. As a docile pupil he entered the competition for the Roman prize in 1789; but Girodet having obtained the first place, a second prize was awarded, and the next year the death of his father prevented him from finishing his competition picture; so that he is one of the exceptions amongst David's pupils, inasmuch as he did not obtain the Prix de Rome. In 1790, however, he accompanied his mother, who was an Italian, to her native country. But his sojourn there was short, as in 1793 he solicited the influence of David to save him from the general conscription; which was done by naming him a member of the Revolutionary tribunal. By taking refuge in his studio and feigning illness, he avoided the exercise of his judicial functions; and the storm passing away, he exhibited in 1795 a picture of Belisarius which attracted attention.



In 1806 Napoleon made him the official portrait painter attached to his court, and ordered the picture of the battle of Austerlitz, finished in 1810. This and indeed all of Gerard's pictures are marked by all the defects of David's methods, and lack the virile quality of his master. His portraits, however, have many qualities of grace and good taste, and his success in France was somewhat analogous to that of Lawrence in England. Under the Restoration his vogue continued; in 1819 he was given the title of baron; and, dying in Paris on January 11, 1837, he left as his legacy to the art of his time no less than twenty-eight historical pictures, many of great dimensions, eighty-seven full-length portraits, and over two hundred smaller portraits, representing the principal men and women of his time. The portraits of the Countess Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely and of the Princess Visconti are both excellent specimens of the work of this estimable painter.



Of the pictures which testify to the industry and talent of Louis-Leopold Boilly, who was born at La Bassee, near Lille, on July 5, 1761, the Louvre possesses but one specimen; namely, the Arrival of a Diligence before the coach-office in Paris. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that with the preoccupation of the public mind with the events of the time, and the prevailing taste for great historical pictures, Boilly's art, so sincere and so intimate in character, was underestimated. It is certainly not due to any lack of industry on the part of the painter. Even at the age of eleven years he undertook to paint, for a religious fraternity of his native town, two pictures representing the miracles of St. Roch. These still exist, and they are said to be meritorious. His facility in seizing the resemblance of his sitter was evidently native, for when only thirteen years of age, without instruction of any kind, he left his parents, and established himself as a portrait painter first at Douai and afterwards at Arras. In 1786 he went to Paris, where he lived until his death. Here he painted a great number of pictures of small size, representing familiar scenes of the streets and of the homes of Paris, and an incredible number of portraits.



A valiant craftsman, happy in his work, following no school but that of nature, careless of official honor (which came to him only when, late in life, on the demand of the Academy, the government accorded him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1833), his life was uneventful. But his little pictures pleased the people who saw themselves so truthfully depicted, and to-day they are more highly esteemed than are the works of many of his at-the-time esteemed contemporaries. He painted for seventy-two years, produced more than five thousand portraits, an incredible number of pictures and drawings, and died, his brush in hand, on January 5, 1845. The little picture of the Arrival of a Diligence presents, with exquisite truthfulness, a Paris unlike the brilliant city of our day, the Paris where Arthur Young in his travels in 1812 notes the absence of sidewalks; a city inhabited by slim ladies dressed a la Grecque, and by high-stocked gentlemen content to travel by post. It is a canvas of more value than the pretentious and tiresome historical compositions of the time, and suggests the reflection that many of the David pupils might have been better employed in putting their scientific accuracy of drawing to the service of rendering the life which they saw about them, instead of producing the arid stretches of academy models posing as Hector or Romulus.

Guillaume-Guillon Lethiere, a painter in whose veins there was an admixture of negro blood, would hardly have echoed the sentiments of this last paragraph, as he lived and worked in the factitious companionship of the Greeks and Romans. So clearly, however, does the temperament of a painter inspire the character of his work that we may be glad that this was the case; for, of his school, Lethiere alone infuses into his classicism something of the turbulent life which marked his own character.



Born in Guadeloupe January 10, 1760, coming to Paris when very young, he took the second prize of Rome in 1784, with a picture of such merit that the regulation was infringed and he was given leave to go to Rome at the same time as the winner of the first prize. His first picture was exhibited in the form of a sketch in the Salon of 1801; and not until eleven years after was the great canvas of Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death shown at the Salon of 1812. The other picture by which he is best known, the Death of Virginia, is, like the preceding, in the Louvre; and though the sketch of this was exhibited in 1795, the picture only took definite form in 1828.



Meanwhile Lethiere had travelled much in England and Spain, and had been for ten years director of the French School of Fine Arts in Rome. His life was adventurous, and it is told of him that he was often involved in quarrels, and fought a number of duels with military officers because, humble civilian that he was, he yet dared to wear the mustache! In 1822 he returned definitely to Paris, where he was made a member of the Institute and professor in the School of Fine Arts, and where he died April 21, 1832. The quality of his work is well characterized by Charles Blanc, who writes of it "as producing the effect of a tragedy sombre and pathetic."

The picture of the Burial of Atala, from Chateaubriand's well-known story, is interesting as showing the methods of the David school applied to subjects of less heroic mould than the master and his disciples were wont to treat. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson, born at Montargis January 3, 1767, was one of the most convinced adherents of his master David; and while competing for the Prize of Rome, which he won in 1789, was accustomed each morning before beginning his work to station himself in front of David's picture of the Horatii as before a shrine, invoking its happy influence. Such devotion received its official reward, and after five years spent in Rome his great (and tiresome) picture of the Deluge met with the greatest favor, and in 1810 was awarded the medal for the best historical picture produced in the preceding decade. The Burial of Atala, painted in 1808, is, however, a work of charm in composition and sentiment; and though in color it is dry and uninteresting, is not unworthy of the popularity which it has enjoyed from the vantage ground of the Louvre for more than four-score years. Girodet died in Paris, December 9, 1824, after having received all the official honors which France can award to a painter.

The charming face of Marie-Anne-Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, who, with the arms of her daughter encircling her, smiles on us here, was undoubtedly not painted in this century, as the painter was born in Paris April 16, 1755, and it is as a young mother that she has represented herself. But as its author lived until March 30, 1842, she should undoubtedly figure among the painters of this century. From early girlhood until old age,

"Lebrun, de la beaute le peintre et le modele."

as Laharpe sang, was, though largely self-taught, a formidable concurrent to painters of the sterner sex. Married when very young to Lebrun, a dealer in pictures and critic of art, a pure marriage of convention, she left France shortly before the Revolution, and went to Italy. Before her departure she was high in favor at the court, and painted no less than twenty portraits of Marie Antoinette.



Fortune favored her in Italy, whence she went to Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and Berlin. In each and every capital the same success, due to her talent, beauty, and amiability, followed her; and at last arriving in St. Petersburg, she remained there until 1801, when she returned to Paris. Some time after, she visited England, where she remained three years, and then returned by way of Holland to France in 1809. The Academy of France and the academies of all other European countries admitted her to membership.

Indefatigable as a worker during her long career, she produced an immense number of portraits; and while she painted comparatively few subject pictures, she arranged her models in so picturesque a fashion that, as in the example here given, her portraits have great charm of composition. With a virile grasp of form, tempered though it be with grace, Madame Lebrun offers an interesting example of woman's work in art; and, while she has nothing to concede to the painters of her time, is no less interesting as showing that by force of native talent the woman of the early part of the century had in her power the conquest of nearly all the desired rights of the New Woman. She has left extremely interesting memoirs of her life, written in her old age, and there are many anecdotes bearing testimony to her wit. One of these goes back to the time when Louis XVIII., then a youth, enlivened the sittings for his portrait by singing, quite out of tune. "How do you think I sing?" inquired he. "Like a prince," responded the amiable artist.

With Antoine Jean Gros we come to the last and the greatest of the pupils of David. Born in Paris March 16, 1771, he competed but once, in 1792, for the Prix de Rome, was unsuccessful, but undertook the voyage thither on his own slender resources the next year. Italy was in a troubled state—he who troubled all Europe in the early years of the century being there at the head of his army; and in 1796, at Genoa, Gros attracted the attention of Madame Bonaparte. It was she who proposed that Gros should paint Napoleon; and Gros consequently went to Milan, and after the battle of Arcole painted the hero carrying the tricolor across the bridge at the head of his grenadiers. The picture pleased Bonaparte, who had it engraved, and gave Gros a commission to collect for the Louvre the chief artistic treasures of Italy. These functions occupied him until 1801, during which period, however, he executed a number of successful portraits.

Returning to Paris after nine years, he painted the Hospital at Jaffa, representing Napoleon visiting the fever-stricken soldiers. The success of this picture, exhibited in 1804, was very great; and it remains Gros's best title to remembrance. In it is something of the reality poetized and seen through the eyes of an artist which characterizes the work of Eugene Delacroix.

The force of David, however, was too great for Gros; at fifty years of age we find him demanding counsel of the master, who sternly bids him leave his "futile subjects," and devote his time to great historical epochs of the past. When David was sent into exile in 1816, it was to Gros that he confided the direction of his school; and this task, and the production of immense canvases like the Battle of the Pyramids, filled his life. The picture here reproduced, the Visit of Charles the Fifth and Francis the First to the Tombs of the Kings in the Cathedral of St. Denis, was painted in 1812.

[Illustration: FRANCIS I., KING OF FRANCE, AND CHARLES V., EMPEROR OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, VISITING THE TOMBS OF THE FRENCH KINGS AT ST. DENIS. FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GROS, IN THE LOUVRE.

Between 1520 and 1545 all Europe was kept in distress and turmoil by a quarrel between Francis I. and Charles V., the chief subject of contention being the duchy of Milan, which Charles held and Francis claimed. Four separate wars were waged by Francis against Charles, all of them unsuccessful. But their majesties had intervals of outward friendship, and in one of these Francis invited Charles, then setting out from Spain for the Low Countries, to pass through France and visit him. The visit was duly paid, was one of great state and ceremony, and from it is derived the incident portrayed in the above picture. Francis is the figure in the centre; Charles, suited in black, standing at his right.]

The revolt which was already making itself felt in French art was a thorn in the flesh of the sensitive Gros. In vain were all the artistic honors showered upon him. In 1824 he was made a baron; since 1816 he had been a member of the Institute; and the crosses of most of the orders of Europe, and the medals of all the exhibitions were his. Nevertheless, about him younger painters revolted. In his secret soul, doubtless, he felt sympathy with their methods. But the commands of the terrible old exile of Brussels were still in his ears.

Finally a portrait of King Charles X., the decorations in the Museum of Sovereigns, and a picture exhibited in the Salon of 1835 were in turn harshly criticized by the press, which looked with favor on the younger men; and Gros, full of years, and of honors which had brought fortune in their train, was found drowned in a little arm of the Seine near Meudon, June 26, 1835. In despair he had taken his own life. With him died David's greatest pupil and a part of David's influence. But that portion of the teachings of the master most consonant with French character is not without effect to-day. Less strong than in the generation following David, absolutely extinct if we are to believe the extremists among the men of to-day, it yet remains a leaven to the fermenting mass of modern production. Perhaps its healthy influence is the best monument to the man who "restored to France the purity of antique taste."



THE DEFEAT OF BLAINE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.

BY MURAT HALSTEAD.

The fame of Blaine does not decline, but increases and will endure. It was not his destiny to fill the greater office created by our Constitution, but with a distinction exceeding that of the majority of Presidents, he is enrolled, with Clay, Webster, and Seward, among the illustrious Secretaries of State. The defeat of James G. Blaine for the Presidency in 1884 will rank among the memorable disappointments and misfortunes of the people with that of Henry Clay, forty years before.

Late in the week before the meeting of the Chicago National Republican Convention in 1884, I received in Cincinnati a telegram from Mr. Blaine requesting me to call on him in Washington, where he lived on the opposite side of Lafayette Square from that of the celebrated old house where he spent his last days. He was engaged on his "Twenty Years in Congress." I called on him the day after his despatch reached me, making haste, for I was about to go to Chicago; and he first said he feared he had sent for me on an insufficient errand, and after a moment's pause began to speak of the approaching convention, and quickly used the expression—"I am alarmed."



"Concerning what are you frightened?" I inquired; and added: "You surely are not afraid you are not going to be nominated?"

He responded with a flash of his eyes and a smile: "Oh, no; I am afraid I shall be nominated, and have sent for you for that reason, and want you to assist in preventing my nomination." I shook my head, and Mr. Blaine asked: "Why not?"

I said I had not been so long in his confidence and known by his friends to be of them, to venture upon such an enterprise as working in opposition. If I should appear actively against him, no matter how I presented the matter, the easy answer to any argument of mine would be that I had relapsed into personal antagonism to him. I then said: "I have not heard of this;" and asked: "Are there many who know that you are against your candidacy?" He said he had talked freely to that effect, and mentioned William Walter Phelps as one who was fully acquainted with his views, and also Colonel Parsons, of the Natural Bridge, Virginia, then in the house. I said: "Mr. Blaine, I think it is too late. I have looked over the field, and your nomination is almost certain—the drift is your way. Why precisely do you object, and what exactly do you think should happen?" He replied in his rapid way with much feeling, and I believe his very words were: "The objection to my nomination is that I cannot be elected. With the South solid against us we cannot succeed without New York, and I cannot carry that State. There are factions there and influences before voting and after voting, such that the party cannot count upon success with me. I am sure of it—I have thought it all over, and my deliberate judgment is as I tell you. I know, too, where I am strong as well as where I am weak—and we might, if we should get into the campaign with my name at the head of the ticket, think we were going to win. We would get to believing it, perhaps, but we should miss it in the end, if not by a great deal, just a little. With everything depending on New York," he continued, "it would be a mistake to nominate me. This is not new to me—I have weighed all the chances. Besides"—and here he kindled—"why should we let the country go into the hands of Democrats when we can name a ticket that is certain to be elected—one that would sweep every Northern State?"

"What is it?" I asked.

The answer came with vivid animation: "William T. Sherman and Robert T. Lincoln." This idea was instantly amplified. "The names of Sherman and Lincoln put together would be irresistible. That ticket would elect itself. We should have a campaign of marching and song. We need the inspiration, and 'Marching Through Georgia' and 'We Are Coming, Father Abraham,' would give it. We must not lose this campaign, and I am alarmed by the prospect of losing it in my name."

"But," I interposed, "it is the report and the public opinion that General Sherman would not consent to be a candidate; that he would throw the party down that would nominate him. Why not try the other Sherman?"

Mr. Blaine's response was that John Sherman would have the like difficulty in carrying New York that he would have himself. The element of military heroism was wanting. He had written to General Sherman on the subject, and of course the General thought he could not consent to be President—for that was what it amounted to—but his reasoning was fallacious. If General Sherman had the question put to him—whether to be President himself or turn the office over to the Democratic party, with the Solid South dominant—he would see his duty and do it, though his reluctance was real.

I said General Sherman could not consent to appear in competition with his brother John at Chicago, though he had a funny way of looking on John in West Point style as a "politician," and that was an insuperable difficulty; and that, Mr. Blaine did not seem to have thought of as a serious element in the case, but he realized the force of it. I was anxious to hear more about the correspondence between Blaine and General Sherman; but was only told that the letter to the General was a call to consider that circumstances might arise, and should do so, in which the General's sense of duty could be appealed to, and be as strong as that to take up arms had been when the Union demanded defenders.



Arrived at Chicago, I soon ascertained that Mr. Blaine had been doing a good deal of talking of the same kind I had heard, but he had not been able to impress the more robust of those favorable to his nomination with the view that he should be heeded. They insisted that he was not wise, but timid; that he did not like war and would do too much for peace; that he especially miscalculated when he said he could not carry New York, for he was the very man who could carry it; that his personal force was far beyond his own estimation; that his intuitions were like those of a woman, but were not infallible; that his singing the campaign was a fancy; that "Marching Through Georgia" would wear out, and was of the stuff of dreams. Mr. Blaine's accredited friends felt that things had gone too far to permit a change to be contemplated. They were half mad at Blaine for his Sherman and Lincoln proposal, which was confidentially in the air, regarding it as not favorable to themselves. They said they could carry the country more certainly with Blaine than Sherman, for Sherman was an uncertain political quantity, and might turn out to be almost the devil himself. Some of them said he would proclaim martial law and annihilate the Constitution! They were sure the force of the celebrity of General Sherman in a campaign had been overestimated by Blaine, who had the caprice and high color in his imagination that produce schemes too fine for success. In a word, Sherman and Lincoln were not practical politicians. Blaine's idea was not politics, but poetry. What they wanted was the magnetism and magic of Blaine. The country was at any rate safely in the hands of the Republican party. They had nearly lost the election because they had not nominated Blaine eight years before, and won with Garfield because he was a Blaine man. The wisdom of the Republican politicians was thus against Blaine's ticket so far as it was known; and those favorable to President Arthur, John Sherman, John A. Logan, and George F. Edmunds did not give the least credit to the statement that Blaine did not want the nomination. His rumored objection to making the race—of course the real reasons were not known—was regarded as a mere "play" in politics, if not altogether fantastic; and they pursued their own courses heedless of the real conditions. There was a singular complication of errors of judgment in the Blaine opposition. The friends of Arthur took the complimentary resolutions from a majority of the States to mean his nomination. In truth, the significance of that unanimity was quite otherwise. Ohio was not solid for Sherman. It is a State that has been very hard to manage in national conventions—was so in the time when Chase was the Republican leader—divided in '60, nominating Lincoln, and rarely presented a front without a flaw for a national candidate. The energy of Logan's friends was not sufficiently supported to give confidence. The reformers by profession and of prominence were for Edmunds; and they were a body of men who had force, if judiciously applied, to have carried the convention, provided they divested themselves of the peculiarities of extreme elevation that prevent efficiency. While they assumed to have soared above practical politics and to abhor the ways of the "toughs" in championing candidates, they subordinated their own usefulness to a sentiment that was limited to a senator—Mr. Edmunds. It was clear at an early hour that the nomination of Mr. Edmunds was impossible. He was put into the combat by Governor Long with a splendid speech, and the mellow eloquence of George William Curtis was for him, and Carl Schurz was a counsellor who upheld the banner of the lawyer statesman of Vermont. The conclusion was to stick to Edmunds; and they stuck until the last, and frittered away their influence. They were in such shape they might, by going in force, at a well-selected time and in a dramatic way, have carried the convention with them. They could not, however, get their own consent to go for Logan, or Arthur, or either of the Shermans; and so Blaine was overruled and nominated.

He did a wonderful work in the campaign, and was himself apparently satisfied at last that his apprehensions as to New York had been unwarranted. Still his words came back to me often during the heat of the summer and the fierce contest. "I cannot carry New York; we shall lose it, perhaps by just a little—but we shall lose it;" and so we did. As the vote was counted the plurality of Mr. Cleveland over Mr. Blaine in the decisive State was one thousand and forty-seven. Gail Hamilton says, in her "Life of Blaine," of the New York election, that there was a plurality claimed on election day for Cleveland of fifty thousand, and "the next day the figures came down to seventeen thousand; then to twelve thousand; the next day to five thousand, and at length dwindled to four hundred and fifty-six." The election was on the 4th, and it was nearly two weeks before a decision was announced. General Butler "openly proclaimed that the New York vote for himself was counted to Cleveland." The "just a little" by which Blaine was beaten was on the face of the returns one thousand and forty-seven, and John Y. McKane was ten years afterward convicted of frauds that were perpetrated as he willed, that amounted to thousands. There was a fraud capacity in the machines of many times the plurality by which Blaine was defeated, and there never was a rational doubt that it was exerted. A change of six hundred votes would have given the Plumed Knight the Presidency, and outside the Solid South he had a popular majority, "leaving out the protested vote of New York and Brooklyn, of nearly half a million." Mr. Blaine, when it became known that the New York vote was held to be against him, and civil war was threatened if the returns were rectified, telegraphed to friends asking their opinion of the New York situation; and I had the honor to be one consulted. My reply was that the New York influences that had prevailed to cause the declaration of a plurality for Cleveland would be sufficient to maintain that determination. Then came the opportunity of those unkindly toward Mr. Blaine to charge him with forcing himself on the Republican party and ruining it with his reckless candidacies, and I thought the facts within my knowledge should be given the public, and wrote to General Sherman, asking him to allow me to publish the correspondence between himself and Blaine, proving that the nomination, instead of being forced by Blaine for himself, was forced upon him; and I wrote to Blaine also, to the same effect. I received from the General the remarkable letters following:

GENERAL SHERMAN TO MR. HALSTEAD.

912 GARRISON AVENUE,

ST. LOUIS, MO., November 17, 1884.

DEAR HALSTEAD:—After my former letter, when I went to put the newspaper slip into my scrap-book, I discovered my mistake in attributing the article to the "Louisville" instead of the "London Times." My opinion is nevertheless not to contest the matter, as the real truth will manifest itself.[I]

I think Arthur could have carried the Republicans past the last election[J]—but no man can tell what issues would have been made in case of his nomination. So the wisest conclusion is to accept gracefully the actual result, and to profit by the mistakes and accidents sure to attend the new administration, handicapped as it will surely be by the hot heads of the South. Truly yours,

W.T. SHERMAN.

912 GARRISON AVENUE,

ST. LOUIS, MO., November 21, 1884.

DEAR HALSTEAD:—I have yours of the 19th. The letter of Blaine to me was meant as absolutely confidential, and of course I would not allow any person to see it without his consent. I am not sure that I would, even with his consent, because I believe the true policy is to look ahead and not behind. Blaine's letter without any answer would be incomplete, and surely I will not have my letter published, as it contained certain points purely personal which the public has no right to. New questions will arise, and these will give you plenty of occupation without raking up the past.

Wishing you always all honor and fame, I am,

Truly yours,

W.T. SHERMAN.

The letters that passed between Blaine and Sherman have appeared in Gail Hamilton's "Biography of Blaine," but have not commanded attention according to their interest, because they have not been framed by the relation of the circumstances that gave them significance and that are supplied in this article.

MR. BLAINE TO GENERAL SHERMAN.

(Confidential.)

Strictly and absolutely so.

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 25, 1884.

MY DEAR GENERAL:—This letter requires no answer. After reading it carefully, file it away in your most secret drawer, or give it to the flames.

At the approaching convention in Chicago it is more than possible—it is indeed not improbable—that you may be nominated for the Presidency. If so you must stand your hand, accept the responsibility, and assume the duties of the place to which you will surely be chosen if a candidate. You must not look upon it as the work of the politicians. If it comes to you, it will come as the ground-swell of popular demand; and you can no more refuse than you could have refused to obey an order when you were a lieutenant in the army. If it comes to you at all, it will come as a call of patriotism. It would, in such an event, injure your great fame as much to decline it as it would for you to seek it. Your historic record, full as it is, would be rendered still more glorious by such an administration as you would be able to give the country. Do not say a word in advance of the convention, no matter who may ask you. You are with your friends, who will jealously guard your honor.

Do not answer this.

JAMES G. BLAINE.

GENERAL SHERMAN TO MR. BLAINE.

ST. LOUIS, May 28, 1884.

HON. J.G. BLAINE.

MY DEAR FRIEND:—I have received your letter of the 25th; shall construe it as absolutely confidential, not intimating even to any member of my family that I have heard from you; and though you may not expect an answer, I hope you will not construe one as unwarranted. I have had a great many letters from all points of the compass to a similar effect, one or two of which I have answered frankly; but the great mass are unanswered. I ought not to subject myself to the cheap ridicule of declining what is not offered; but it is only fair to the many really able men who rightfully aspire to the high honor of being President of the United States to let them know that I am not, and must not be construed as, a rival. In every man's life there occurs an epoch when he must choose his own career, and when he may not throw the responsibility, or tamely place his destiny in the hands of friends. Mine occurred in Louisiana when, in 1861, alone in the midst of a people blinded by supposed wrongs, I resolved to stand by the Union as long as a fragment of it survived to which to cling. Since then, through faction, tempest, war, and peace, my career has been all my family and friends could ask. We are now in a good home of our choice, with reasonable provision for old age, surrounded by kind and admiring friends, in a community where Catholicism is held in respect and veneration, and where my children will naturally grow up in contact with an industrious and frugal people. You have known and appreciated Mrs. Sherman from childhood, have also known each and all the members of my family, and can understand, without an explanation from me, how their thoughts and feelings should and ought to influence my action; but I will not even throw off on them the responsibility. I will not, in any event, entertain or accept a nomination as a candidate for President by the Chicago Republican convention, or any other convention, for reasons personal to myself. I claim that the Civil War, in which I simply did a man's fair share of work, so perfectly accomplished peace, that military men have an absolute right to rest, and to demand that the men who have been schooled in the arts and practice of peace shall now do their work equally well. Any senator can step from his chair at the Capitol into the White House, and fulfil the office of President with more skill and success than a Grant, Sherman or Sheridan, who were soldiers by education and nature, who filled well their office when the country was in danger, but were not schooled in the practices by which civil communities are, and should be, governed. I claim that our experience since 1865 demonstrates the truth of this my proposition. Therefore I say that "patriotism" does not demand of me what I construe as a sacrifice of judgment, of inclination, and of self-interest. I have my personal affairs in a state of absolute safety and comfort. I owe no man a cent, have no expensive habits or tastes, envy no man his wealth or power, [have] no complications or indirect liabilities, and would account myself a fool, a madman, an ass, to embark anew, at sixty-five years of age, in a career that may, at any moment, [become] tempest-tossed by the perfidy, the defalcation, the dishonesty, or neglect of any one of a hundred thousand subordinates utterly unknown to the President of the United States, not to say the eternal worriment by a vast host of impecunious friends and old military subordinates. Even as it is, I am tortured by the charitable appeals of poor distressed pensioners; but as President, these would be multiplied beyond human endurance. I remember well the experience of Generals Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes and Garfield, all elected because of their military services, and am warned, not encouraged, by their sad experiences. No—count me out. The civilians of the United States should, and must, buffet with this thankless office, and leave us old soldiers to enjoy the peace we fought for, and think we earned.

With profound respect, your friend,

W.T. SHERMAN.



There is intrinsic evidence that these letters were not written with a thought of possible publication. That which General Sherman says about Catholicism could only have been told to a close and sympathetic friend. Mrs. Sherman and Mr. Blaine were cousins, and their mothers were Catholics. Mrs. Sherman was one whose devotion to the Church was intense; and General Sherman could not endure the thought that her religion should be subjected to such discussions as were certain to arise in a Presidential campaign. She was a very noble and gifted woman, and the happiness of herself and husband in their domestic life was beautiful and elevated.

James G. Blaine was nearer the Presidency than any other man who did not reach the office. It was by a very narrow margin that he missed the nomination in Cincinnati in 1876; and the opposition he encountered there from Republican editors was regretted by all of them, because they believed when the storm ceased that he had been accused excessively, sensationally, and maliciously, and condemned—by those who did not appreciate his vindication—on evidence that was indicated but not presented—on letters supposed to have been taken from the original package, and that were not produced because they never existed. The investigations were largely instigated and carried on to continue agitation with the purpose to strike down a brilliant man whose genius gave him almost incredible promotion, and to assail him because he was lofty and aspiring. The personal fight that he made in Congress when cruelly set upon was one of the most effective that ever took place in a public body. A competent observer, who was a spectator of the scene in the House when the Mulligan letters were read, said as Blaine came down the aisle, the letters in his hand, and called upon all the millions of his countrymen to be witnesses: "I thought his fist was going right up through the dome." Unhappily, his exciting experiences in the course of these fierce controversies, with the conduct of his Cincinnati campaign, and the sultry weather, caused his prostration, attended with hours of unconsciousness, just at the critical time when the delegates were assembling in national convention. The local influences; the Republican editorial antagonism; the enthusiastic efforts for Bristow; the strenuous perseverance of Morton of Indiana; the prestige of Conkling, backed with the high favor of Grant; the solidity of Ohio for Hayes—all would have been overwhelmed but for the incident of the fall of Blaine in a swoon at the door of the church which he was in the habit of attending and that he was about to enter with his wife. It is reasonable to believe, if he had been the candidate that year, he could have carried the election unequivocally, and that his administration would have vastly strengthened the Republican party. It is due President Hayes, however, to say that his administration of the great office was an era of good for the country, and that he was succeeded by a Republican; but the fact of a disputed Presidency had a far-reaching evil influence, and prevented showing fair play in New York in 1884. Blaine lost in his illness coincident with the Cincinnati convention the confidence of the country in his firm health and strength, and that handicapped him to his grave. Perhaps it is even more important that he lost faith in himself as a strong man, and had almost a superstition that if he became President it would be for him personally a fatality. And yet he was intellectually a growing man for fifteen years after his Cincinnati defeat. His greater works, his most influential ideas, the full fruition of his gifts, were after that catastrophe.

Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious, that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed. Those very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening; about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater. One who studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a phenomenon. He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on earth or in the air that did not tell him something. He was like an instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and wore like steel. He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the ordinary man.

It was after his first and, as it turned out, final defeat for the Presidency, in his earliest effort for the office, that his fame grew splendid. His campaigning was fascinating, and his speeches, as the years passed, took greater variety. In his tour when a candidate in 1884, his addresses were marvellous in aptitude and in a thousand felicities. There was much said of the fact that he was not a lawyer, and an affected superiority to him by gentlemen whose profession permitted "fees," and there was a system of deprecation to the effect that he only harangued, that he had neither originality nor grace. But after Garfield's death and the retirement of the Secretary from the Cabinet, he turned to writing history "as a resource," and his great work is of permanent value to the country, while his Garfield oration is one of the masterpieces of the highest rank; and there came straight from his brain two far-flashing ideas—that of the union of American nations, and to protect the policy of protection with reciprocity—and in the two there is the manifestation of that crowning glory of public life which enters the luminous atmosphere of immortality—statesmanship. That he had not the opportunity of the execution of these policies—of guiding and shaping their triumph—was not his fault but his fate. Their time may be coming but slowly, yet it surely will come. His zeal in behalf of making the protective principle irresistible by associating it intimately with reciprocity, was so strong that he grew impatient when others were tedious in comprehension; and there was a story of his concluding a sharp admonition to the laborers on the tariff schedules by "smashing his new silk hat on a steam-heater in the committee-room." He was asked by a friend who rode out with him to see the statue that he thought the most accurate and impressive of all the likenesses of Lincoln and was fond of driving to see, located in a park east of the Capitol—that by Story—whether he had "smashed a new silk hat" on a steam-heater on behalf of reciprocity; and he softly responded, "It was not a new hat."

That Mr. Blaine was keenly disappointed when defeated for the Presidency at Cincinnati, there is no doubt; and that he began then to see that it was not his destiny to be President, is certain.

There is a great contrast in his favor in his manner of bearing this disappointment with that of Clay and Webster under somewhat similar circumstances. Clay was furious at the nomination of General William Henry Harrison, and greeted with unmeasured denunciation those responsible for that judicious act; and Webster was bitter when Taylor and Scott were nominated in the first instance, but came, after a time, grandly out of the clouds. It is an interesting coincidence that Webster when Secretary of State was a candidate for the Presidential nomination against his chief, President Fillmore, and died, on the 24th of October, 1852, a few months after Scott's triumph at Baltimore and a few days before the popular election of Pierce. The enduring memory of Mr. Blaine appeared in the last October he lived, in the precise remark, when something was said of the death of Webster, "Ah! day after to-morrow it will be forty years since Webster died." The news of the nomination of Hayes, Blaine received serenely, and before the vote was declared in the convention sent the nominee a cordial telegram of congratulation. When he knew at Augusta in 1884 that he was beaten, he said: "Personally I care less than my nearest friends would believe, but for the cause and for many friends I profoundly deplore the result." And that was the entire truth. He felt that he had not been fairly beaten, but he gave utterance only to the public wrong done in the unfairness, and left that expression as a warning to the country. He did not, as we have seen, follow the example of Clay, who persistently favored his own candidacy. On the contrary, Blaine did not covet the Presidency, and tried to avoid the personal strife of 1884, and not for any of the apprehensive motives attributed to him by those who acted upon the feeling in his case that the spirit of justice was malevolent.

I feel that I should not now deal fairly with the public if I did not give here the letter from Blaine in my possession, that more completely than any published gives expression to his personal bearing when defeated.

LETTER FROM MR. BLAINE TO MR. HALSTEAD.

(Personal.)

AUGUSTA, MAINE, 16th Nov., '84.

DEAR MR. HALSTEAD:—I think there would be no harm to the public and no personal injustice if you should insert the three enclosed items in your editorial columns.

I feel quite serene over the result. As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher, and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York, I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat, which flowed directly from these agencies.

In missing a great honor I escaped a great and oppressive responsibility. You know—perhaps better than any one—how much I didn't want the nomination; but perhaps, in view of all things, I have not made a loss by the canvass. At least I try to think not. The other candidate would have fared hard in Maine, and would have been utterly broken in Ohio.

Sincerely,

JAMES G. BLAINE.

Of course all this is private.

P.S.—This note was written before receipt of yours. Pray publish nothing of the kind you intimate unless you first permit me to see the proof. Don't be afraid of the enclosed items. They are rock-ribbed for truth and for a good rendering of public opinion.

Mr. Blaine refers in the closing paragraph to the proposition I made to him to publish the true story of his candidacy—substantially the same pressed upon the attention of General Sherman. Between them they suppressed me, but it is due them that this chapter of history should be known now that they are gone.

I had the privilege of walking with Mr. Blaine in the beautiful and fragrant parks at Homburg, in Southern Germany, in the summer of 1887, and discussing with him the question whether he should be a candidate for the Republican nomination the next spring. He then seemed to be very well, but exertion speedily fatigued him. He was on sight a very striking personage, and always instantly regarded with interest by strangers. His personal appearance was of the utmost refinement and of irreproachable dignity. His absolute cleanliness was something dainty, his dress simple but fitting perfectly and of the best material. His face was very pale, but his sparkling eyes contradicted the pallor.

His form was erect, and his figure that of youth. His hair and beard were exquisitely white. His mouth had the purity of a child's, and he never had tasted tobacco or used spirituous liquors, save when his physician had recommended a little whiskey, and then not enough to color a glass. He drank sparingly of claret and champagne, caring only for the flavor. He was gentle, kindly, genial, and in a manly sense beautiful. There are many distinguished English people at Homburg in the season, and they were gratified to meet Mr. Blaine, and charmed with him. It required no ceremony to announce him as a personage—a man who had made events—and he never posed or gave the slightest hint, in his movements, of conscious celebrity. I never saw him bothered by being aware of himself but once, and that was when, across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the dusk of an evening, he shaded his face with his hand, and looked curiously at ten thousand people who were gazing at the house, and shouting madly for him, expecting that he would appear at a window and make acknowledgment of their enthusiasm. Suddenly he saw in the glance of one beside him that he was curiously yet doubtfully regarded, and hastened away in fear of his friends, who in their delight at discovering him would have become a mob.

In Homburg he seemed to care for others' opinions about the proper course for him to take; and the substance of that which I had to say—and he seemed to think me in a way representative—was that he alone must decide for himself, as he only knew all the circumstances and elements that must be considered in a decision. Once we walked the main street of the town in the night—and it is then a very lonely place, for it is the fashion to get up in the morning at six o'clock, and take the waters and the music—and that time I was impressed, and the impression abided, that the inner conviction of Mr. Blaine was he had not the vitality to safely take the Presidency if he held it in his hand; that he believed the office would wear him out—that it was a place of dealing with persons who would worry away his existence; that he felt he could not endure the wear and tear and pressure of the first position, and preferred the Secretaryship of State, with the hope of going on with his South American policy, which he had developed in Garfield's time, brief as that was; and I conjectured that all this had been in his mind when he wanted Sherman and Lincoln to be the ticket in 1884. And it occurred to me with so much force as the logic of many things he said, that I accepted it as true, and was reminded of his weary exclamation once of a good friend whose moods were changeable: "Now that he is right, stay with him. He takes the health out of me with his uncertainties."

The Secretaryship of State he cared for; in that office the world was all before him, and he was fully himself, and was not fretted by a perpetual procession of favor-seekers. The argument his urgent admirers used with him was that it would be easier to make up his mind than to convince a President, and that as the Chief of State he could throw the work on the Cabinet; but he was not satisfied. The Florence letter to me seemed familiar, for it was a reminder of Homburg, and its sincerity was in all the lines and between the lines; and it was addressed to a friend in Pittsburg, that it might not be suppressed in New York. He had very close and influential friends who did not divine his true attitude, or would not admit that they had, and insisted that he was really well and strong and tough, better than he had been, and that he should not be humored in his fancy that he was an invalid. This feeling continued even to 1892, though he had been meantime painfully broken by a protracted illness. It will be remembered that in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted, there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr. Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.



When Mr. Blaine was for the last time in New York on his way to Washington, stopping as was his habit at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he asked me to walk with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task, unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr. Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar—something else! He seated himself in the light of the fire, on an easy-chair. There was a knock at his door, and a servant handed him a card, and he said: "No;" and we were alone. I could not think of a word of consolation; and in a moment he appeared to have forgotten me, and stared in a fixed, rapt dream at the flickering flame in the grate. It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was impossible—for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield, picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean, while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered face of the dying man felt "the breath of the eternal morning."

Some weeks earlier Mr. Blaine and I had had a deep talk about men and things, and he was very kind, and his boundless generosity of nature never revealed itself with a greater or sadder charm. He now remembered that conversation—as a word disclosed—and said: "I could have endured all things if my boys had not died." The door opened, and his secretary walked in—and I took Mr. Blaine's hand for the last time, saying, "Good-night," and he said, with a look that meant farewell—"Good-by."

His grave is on a slope that when I saw it was goldenly sunny, and the turf was strewn by his wife's hand with lilies—for it was Easter morning! Close at his left was a steep, grassy bank, radiantly blue with violets, and there was in the shining air the murmurous hum of bees, making a slumbrous, restful music. Blaine's monument is a hickory tree whose broken top speaks of storms, and at his feet is a stone white as new snow, and on it only—and they are enough—the initials "J.G.B.," that were the battle-cry of millions, and are and shall be always to memory dear.

[Footnote I: This related to a matter General Sherman had mentioned in another letter, and did not refer to the subject I was trying to get him to consider.]

[Footnote J: General Sherman differed in this judgment with Blaine and many Republicans who were not unfriendly to Arthur.]



THE NEW STATUE OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.

BY FRANK B. GESSNER.

The erection of an equestrian statue of General William Henry Harrison, in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a fitting but also a tardy commemoration of a man who rendered his State and the nation most distinguished services. For fifty years there has been talk of doing him honor in some such fashion, and even the statue which as this Magazine goes to press is being formally dedicated in Cincinnati (in the presence of a grandson of the subject who is himself an ex-President), has been completed for some years, and has been stowed away in dust and darkness because there was not public interest enough in the matter to meet the cost of setting it up.

Although now almost a forgotten figure, General Harrison was one of the ablest and worthiest of our public men. Born in Berkeley, Virginia, February 9, 1773, he grew to manhood with the close of the Revolution and the establishment of the national government. His father was the friend of Washington, and when the son went into the Western wilds he held a commission as ensign signed by the first of the Presidents. At the age of thirty he was a delegate in Congress from the Northwest Territory. For a succeeding decade he was governor of that wide stretch of country which in time he saw carved into States all owing much to his genius as warrior and statesman. In the second war with Great Britain he commanded the Western armies, and won the notable victories of Tippecanoe and the Thames. The first gave him a name which became the slogan of the Whigs in the memorable campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." At the battle of the Thames fell Tecumseh, whose death broke the Indian power east of the Mississippi. After the war of 1812 General Harrison was successively Congressman, Senator of the United States, and Minister to Colombia.



Returning in 1830 to his home at North Bend, on the line between Indiana and Ohio, he lived more or less in retirement until 1836, when he was made the Whig candidate for President. He was defeated; but in 1840 he was again the nominee, and, after the greatest campaign of the century, was elected, defeating Martin Van Buren. The campaign of 1840 was called the "log-cabin and hard-cider" campaign, though the reputed log-cabin home of the Whig candidate was in reality a spacious mansion. General Harrison was inaugurated March 4, 1841, and on April 4, a month later, he died in the White House, a victim of exposure and the wearing importunities of office-seeking constituents. Something of the character of the man is disclosed in his last words, spoken four hours before his death. To whom he thought himself speaking can only be conjectured—Vice-President Tyler, some authorities claim; but he was heard by his physician to say: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

Physically, General Harrison has been described as "about six feet high," straight and rather slender, and of "a firm, elastic gait," even in his last years. He had "a keen, penetrating eye," a "high, broad and prominent" forehead, and "rather thin and compressed lips."



Mrs. Harrison was not with her husband at his death, and never became an inmate of the White House. For that reason there hangs on its walls no portrait of her, among those of the various ladies of the mansion. She was the daughter of John Cleves Symmes, a scion of the Colonial aristocracy. She loved better than the excitement of social life in Washington the domestic peace of her North Bend home and the society of her thirteen children, growing up in usefulness and honor. In her youth she had been a great belle, and she remained a beautiful woman even in her declining years. She was educated in that first fashionable school for young women in America founded by Isabella Graham in the city of New York. A sister, Polly Symmes, was also a famous beauty. They went together to share their father's fortunes in the unsettled West, and both found their fates in the hand of the Miamis. Polly married Peyton Short, who became a millionaire.

Mrs. Harrison had been detained by illness from going with her husband to witness the proudest event of his life, his inauguration; and she had purposed following him to Washington later in the spring, when the weather should be more favorable for the long, wearisome journey by stage-coach. But, alas! before the spring fully opened, instead of following him to Washington she was following his body to its silent, stone-walled tomb, overlooking the wide sweep of the Ohio southward. This noble woman lived to be eighty-nine and to see her grandson, Benjamin Harrison, now ex-President, a general in the Union army. She retained to the last much of her beauty and that sweetness of disposition which has endeared her memory to those of her blood who knew her best. She sleeps by the side of her husband in the old vault at North Bend.

The Cincinnati statue of General Harrison is the work of L.T. Rebisso, who made the statue of General McPherson which stands in one of the circular parks in Washington, and the equestrian statue of General Grant for the city of Chicago. Its cost, which, exclusive of the pedestal, is twenty-seven thousand dollars, is paid by the city. Mr. Rebisso has given a portrayal of Harrison unlike any of the more familiar pictures. These usually present a decrepit old man, from whose eye have vanished that fire of youth and flash of soul which made Harrison a leader of men. The Rebisso statue, as will be seen by the reproduction of it given herewith, presents a soldier in the full flower of vigorous manhood. And this conception is no mere ideal of fancy, but is taken from a portrait painted in 1812, which now hangs in the house of a grandchild of General Harrison near the old North Bend homestead.



THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship, Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot.

"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his mother.

"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she answered with quaint devoutness.

But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company," and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two, and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great tears blinded his sight.

We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a living—and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head. But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's blessing, an apprehension for the future—bitter, breathless, began to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain, had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a meaning.

But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread into the house.

"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces before him.

"Lord a-mercy!"

"Ikey! Air you teched?"

"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss—he went—see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he—"

"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.

"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an' live with you, mother—won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother you've got now. Your folks can spare you."

Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life, the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.

"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height, displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head, and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks. From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day—for how could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about the heifer?—Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.

August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months. Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naively considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.

At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:

"In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father.— 2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."

"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it, neither."

Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and to board him in the cheapest way for several days.

"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height, "no one can!"

It is just such country lads as this—strong, self-reliant, religious—who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other, by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.

Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of unuttered misery.

But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.



"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance, and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.

"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"

She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped that they might clasp about his neck.

"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong. Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an honest man, an' a pious woman, and"—dropping with great solemnity into scriptural language—"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your godly name."

With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their sons into the whirlwind of the world.

Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her, and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.

"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man, moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.

Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.

They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken, helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the parlor window. If he had known—a doubt crossed his brain, but the girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting, breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they hid behind an oak tree and clasped.

* * * * *

It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters. He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull" or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be swerved.

To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience—and how else should he? This was his syllogism:

A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.

This man before me is a policeman.

Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to him for advice.

The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise—and laughed at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a "billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.

It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the guardian of the peace confidently.

This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity. The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet were in his air.

"Excuse me, sir—I want to ask you—" began Isaac, after a proper obeisance.

"Move on, will yer!"

"But I wanted to ask you—"

"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"

"I want you to help me!"

"The —— you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye to the lock-up—so help me—!"

Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had received half annihilated his intelligence.



Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him. It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror—not of cowardice, but of friendlessness—seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on. He had passed through the main street—or across it—he did not know—until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms had been exchanged for vulgar saloons—until—