able to be a voluminous letter-writer. The letters he wrote
were mostly on business, or in acknowledgment of others,
and they were written at times when it was scarcely possible
to engage in discussions of opinions or of the events of the
day. Besides, his relations to his contemporaries were re-
stricted, and, except with his intimate and life-long friend,
Mr. Richard H. Dana, he cannot be said to have maintained
any extensive correspondence. Nevertheless, out of the brief
and familiar notes interchanged with his friends, I have been
able to select many passages which, I trust, will be found
of interest, either as illustrative of the times or of the writer's
character. Whatever he said was gracefully said, and, either
in the mode of expression or in the turn of the thought,
was apt to contain something worthy of attention.

I will confess that I have been greatly embarrassed as
to how I should treat the editorial part of his life, the more
so as there are no models that I know of in English lit-
erature for work of the kind. The statesman by the meas-
ures he promotes, the soldier by his battles, the author
by his books, and the artist by his works, furnishes certain
stages, or, as the French say, étapes, or halting-places, in his
career, which enables the biographer to mark the steps of
his progress. But the life of the editor affords no such
salient points. His labors consist of a series of incessant
and innumerable blows, of the real influences of which it is
hard to judge, except in a general way. It can only be
told of him what he endeavored to do, and not what he
actually did. Whatever effects he may have wrought on
public opinion were wrought by indefinitely small incre-
ments, of the precise force and value of which we have no
measure.

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