Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

She was not so much to be called affectionate or lovable as good-natured and kindly; and with an undisguised relish for the comfortable things of this world, and a very frank liking for the society of the rich and great, she was yet constant, after a fashion, to humbler friends, and liked to do them good turns. Much of her amiability took the form of flattery,—a flattery so habitual that it lost all its grossness, and became almost a form of good deeds. She was sometimes justly accused of applying this to the wealthy and influential, but it was almost as freely exercised where she had nothing to gain by it; and it gave to the humblest the feeling that he was at least worth flattering. Even if he had a secret fear that what she said of him behind his back might be less encouraging, no matter: it was something to have been praised to his face. It must be owned that her resources in the other direction were considerable, and Lord Steyne himself might have applauded when she was gradually led into mimicking some rich amateur who had pooh-poohed her pictures, or some intrusive dame who had patronizingly inspected her humble cot. It could not quite be said of her that her wit lived to play, not wound; and yet, after all, what she got out of life was so moderate, and so many women would have found her way of existence dreary enough, that it was impossible to grudge her these trifling indulgences.

Inheriting her father’s love of the brush, she had little of his talent; her portraits of friends were generally transferred by degrees to dark corners; but there existed an impression that she was a good copyist of Stuart’s pictures, and she was at one time a familiar figure in Boston, perched on a high stool, and copying those of his works which were transferred for safe-keeping from Faneuil Hall to the Art Museum. On one occasion, it was said, she grew tired of the long process of copying and took home a canvas or two with the eyes unpainted, putting them in, colored to please her own fancy, at Newport. Perhaps she invented this legend for her own amusement, for she never spared herself, and, were she to read this poor sketch of her, would object to nothing but the tameness of its outlines.

XV
JOHN BARTLETT

JOHN BARTLETT

In every university town such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is an outside circle, beyond the institution itself, of cultivated men who may or may not hold its degrees, but who contribute to the intellectual atmosphere. One of the most widely known and generally useful of these at Cambridge—whether in his active youth or in the patient and lonely seclusion of his later years—was John Bartlett, best known as the author of the dictionary entitled “Familiar Quotations.”

He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, was educated in the public schools of that town, and in 1836 entered the bookbinding establishment connected with the University bookstore in Cambridge, under John Owen, who was Longfellow’s first publisher. In the next year Bartlett became a clerk in the bookstore, and soon showed remarkable talent for the business. In 1846 Mr. Owen failed, and Bartlett remained with his successor, George Nichols, but became himself the proprietor in 1849. He had shown himself in this position an uncommonly good publisher and adviser of authors. He had there published three editions of his “Familiar Quotations,” gradually enlarging the book from the beginning. In 1859 he sold out to Sever & Francis. In 1862 he served as volunteer naval paymaster for nine months with Captain Boutelle, his brother-in-law, on board Admiral DuPont’s dispatch-boat. In August, 1863, he entered the publishing house of Little, Brown & Co., nominally as clerk, but with the promise that in eighteen months, when the existing partnership would end, he should be taken into the firm, which accordingly took place in 1865. The fourth edition of his “Familiar Quotations,” always growing larger, had meanwhile been published by them, as well as an édition de luxe of Walton’s “Complete Angler,” in the preparation of which he made an especial and exceptionally fine collection of works on angling, which he afterwards presented to the Harvard College Library. His activity in the Waltonian sport is also commemorated in Lowell’s poem, “To Mr. John Bartlett, who had sent me a seven-pound trout.” He gave to the Library at the same time another collection of books containing “Proverbs,” and still another on “Emblems.”

After his becoming partner in the firm, the literary, manufacturing, and advertising departments were assigned to him, and were retained until he withdrew altogether. The fifth and sixth editions of his “Quotations” were published by Little, Brown & Co., the seventh and eighth by Routledge of London, the ninth by Little, Brown & Co. and Macmillan & Co. of London, jointly; and of all these editions between two and three hundred thousand copies must have been sold. Of the seventh and eighth editions, as the author himself tells us, forty thousand copies were printed apart from the English reprint. The ninth edition, published in 1891, had three hundred and fifty pages more than its predecessor, and the index was increased by more than ten thousand lines. In 1881 Mr. Bartlett published his Shakespeare “Phrase-Book,” and in February, 1889, he retired from his firm to complete his indispensable Shakespeare “Concordance,” which Macmillan & Co. published at their own risk in London in 1894.