magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated
whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
of lovely kindness for having used in my 'Venetian Life' the Briticism
'directly' for 'as soon as.'

Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and