deacon whom he had heard reading, at a prayer-meeting, Watts's fine hymn, "Am I a Soldier of the Cross ?" I still recall the thrill with which his deep voice rolled out the words:

Are there no foes for me to face?
Must I not stem the flood
Is this vile world a friend to grace,
To bear me on to God?

When Pillsbury paused at each solemn phrase to hold the poor deacon up to it. as if searing him with a red-hot iron-"What

EDMUND QUINCY

From a photograph taken about 1875.

foes had he faced ?" " What flood had he stemmed ?" "What had this vile world ever done to secure grace for him?" it brought back the fierce old Calvinistic images of the Deity holding the sinner over the flames of hell and dropping him in; and none of Scott's Habakkuk Muckleraths or Crockett's Cameronian hill-folk could have left a more inexorable stamp upon the memory of the hearer.

I dwell on these minor figures, because that of Garrison has been delineated by his sons with wonderful detail and keennessthough, as I think, with something of that

one-sidedness which it is perhaps better that a first biography should possess. Phillips also has been frequently discussed and delineated, by myself among others; while Edmund Quincy, the twin of Phillips in social antecedents and sacrifices, but not in oratorical power, has passed far too much out of sight. Coming of a race in which political leadership was and is hereditary, fuller than Phillips of a natural fastidiousness which made the storms and extremes of

the platform distasteful to him, Quincy yet did his duty with absolute and unshrinking fidelity; took the fatigues of the convention without its laurels; was readier than any one to make the difficult opening speech before the audience got settled; and was an admirable and patient presiding officer. Always scrupulously dressed, in the blue dress-coat and brass buttons of that day; an exquisite critic on all points of pronunciation, of manners, of language-knowing his Horace Walpole and his Sévigné by heart, and able to solve any problem of European court usagehe had just laid all public life aside, even to his commission as Justice of the Peace, because he believed the Constitution pro-slavery. Nothing could be more curious than the difference between his later years and those of Phillips; when slavery fell, Phillips simply shifted the harness for service in other reforms; while Quincy, like a tired steed, merely shook himself and dropped the reformer's equipment altogether; utterly denied that there was anything left to fight for, and pronounced woman suffrage, for instance, a case in which there was "no grievance." He simply became a reformer emeritus, in the university phrase; was for the rest of his life a brilliant and delightful flâneur; went to the theater. with the constancy of a Parisian; became Secretary of the learned societies which had rejected him in earlier days; resumed, in short, that life of the cultivated Bostonian which Howells has so well painted in his "A Modern Instance" and elsewhere.

The same course was followed in later days by that superb woman, Maria Weston Chapman, whom Lowell, with his usual unerring touch, delineated in his description of the same Anti-Slavery Fair of 1846:

There was Maria Chapman, too,
With her swift eyes of clear steel blue,
The coiled-up mainspring of the fair
Originating ever; where

The expansive force without a sound
That whirled a hundred wheels around,

other young people, to assist in decorating Faneuil Hall for the great anti-slavery fair, to which England and America both contributed. One year, I remember, I arrived to find everything in seeming confusionboxes and barrels to be unloaded, wreaths to be woven and arranged, tables to be spread, rugs to be laid, teamsters and expressmen impatient, plenty of people to do everything, yet nothing done. The answer to every inquiry was, Mrs. Chapman has been delayed on the railroad." Ten minutes after the appointed time she appeared, placid and

66

inexorable; her queenly figure erect, her "fair tresses" waving and worn high after the fashion of those days. In two minutes more she had taken her stand with a little note-book in the middle of Faneuil Hall; the teamsters and expressmen had laid down their loads and were being paid and discharged one by one; the wreaths were being made and placed; the tables were being spread, every wheel of the c'ock was in motion, and when the hour of opening came the fair was ready. Sheridan at Winchester did not more instantaneously reveal the leader. Yet when slavery

was abolished, she, too, found her work done; and so far as she prolonged its quarrels and jealousies into her memoir of Harriet Martineau she appeared, as I have already intimated, to the least advantage.

I have often asked myself whether it is really true that the Garrisonian or Disunion Abolitionists were really a superior type of reformers to any other which I have encountered, or whether it is in part a glamour which my youth threw around them. Yet I was not much older when I became intimately acquainted with Social Reformers or Fourierites, with Temperance agitators, with Woman Suffrage advocates; and I have never had quite the same glamour about them. With admirable individuals among all these, yet the collective tone has never seemed to be pitched quite so high. Still less have I found any such elevation of standard among clergymen, for instance, or college professors, or men in public office. I can only explain it by remembering that the anti-slavery reform was, of all such movements, the most absolutely disinterested, with the largest proportion of sacrifice and the smallest of personal benefit. It had undoubtedly in it that possibility of moral darger which even a small body may hold in the way of internal ambitions-as, doubtless, all the tumults of jealousy may rage within the limits of a parish sewingcircle; and some of its leaders were undoubtedly placed by it in a position of higher social prominence than they would otherwise have obtained, and thus gratified their ambition, if such poor ambition they had. For others again-as Phillips, Quincy, and Mrs. Childit was a life of absolutely pure self-sacrifice; it separated them from the friends, the career, the pursuits which they would otherwise have chosen. The ideal of Phillips's existence, as I have often heard him admit, would have been the Senate or the Bar; and nothing but the purest self-abnegation led him to substitute for this the toilsome career of a wandering lecturer, a life he always hated. He honestly disliked, I think, to hear speeches or even to make them, and yet he gave his life to this arduous work until it became a second nature. More than once, in going to a meeting with him, I have heard him say: "What strange infatuation takes these people to hear public addresses? There is that respectable-looking pair across the street; they must have a happy home, probably with books, pictures, and music. Why do they leave it to hear somebody talk ?" No doubt