Authors at home: Personal and biographical sketches of well-known American writers

PERSONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN WRITERS
EDITED BY J. L. & J. B. GILDER
NEW YORK A. WESSELS COMPANY 1902
Copyright, 1889, BY O. M. DUNHAM.
Copyright, 1902, BY A. WESSELS COMPANY.
The sketches of authors at home in this book have as their special value the fact that the writer of each article was selected for the purpose by the author himself. The sketches appeared from time to time in The Critic , where they attracted particular attention by virtue of their authenticity, as well as for the names of the subjects and the writers.
The Canadian border has been crossed in the article on Prof. Goldwin Smith; but with this exception the series treats only of native American writers who make their home on this side of the Atlantic. Since these sketches were written, some of the most distinguished of the authors in the list have died, all of them meeting natural deaths, with one exception, Mr. Paul Leicester Ford.
J. L. G.
New York, June, 1902 .
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Beacon Hill is the great pyramid, or horn of dominion, as it were, of Boston’s most solid respectability of the older sort. Half-way up Beacon Hill, Aldrich is to be met with at the office of The Atlantic Monthly , of which he has been the editor since 1881. The publishers of this magazine have established its headquarters, together with their general business, in the old Quincy mansion, at No. 4 Park Street, which they have had pleasantly remodeled for their purposes. Close by, on the steep slope, is the Union Club; across the street the long, shaded stretch of Boston Common; and above it is the State House, presiding over the quarter, with its imposing golden dome half hidden amid the greenery. The editor’s office is secluded, small, neat, and looks down into a quiet old graveyard, like those of St. Paul’s and Trinity in New York. It seems a place strictly adapted to business, and is cut off from the outer world even by so much of a means of communication as a speaking-tube. There was formerly a speaking-tube, but an importunate visitor had his ear to it, and received a somewhat hasty message intended only in confidence for the call-boy, and it was abolished. “Imagine the feelings of a sensitive man— my feelings, of course—on such an occasion,” says the editor with characteristic drollery. “I flew at the tube, plugged it up with a cork, and drove that in with a poker!” Among the few small objects that can be called ornament scattered about is remarked a photograph of a severely classic doorway, which might have belonged to some famous monument of antiquity. It has a funereal look, to tell the truth, but it proves to be nothing less than the doorway of the residence of Thomas Bailey Aldrich himself, in Mt. Vernon Street. Like one of his own paradoxes, it has a very different aspect when put amid its proper surroundings.