"I have decided to have fifty done up instead of ten: want them for my own promiscuous use: for Doctor, for you, for others. These can be done up at any time, in any way, you choose. Then the rest must be made more durable: strong: not to be destroyed: made so they will not need to be remade—people will not want to change them." The idea of having them in vellum, gilt top, &c., appeals to him.

     I wrote Blauvelt to-day. W.: "I am glad that you did." And when I told him what I had said: "That was right: that was just what I should have wished you to say." Then adding: "But I wrote to him myself, too: the breakfast was so good—the bird so fat, so sweet: I felt I should render thanks for it: only a postal—a few words." Described a letter from Bucke as "an echo merely of the last: his trip postponed, Gurd expected back: to go to Ottawa to secure patents: all that over again." Sneered at the "legal processes"—their "dilatoriness, procrastinateness"—how our "jurisprudence is a weak modelling upon England's": the "obscurity of legal formulas," and so forth. Emerson was mentioned. W. spoke of Emerson's poetry—its "plentiful and healthful disregard for conventions, forms," and so forth—its "undoubtable power." "I can easily see how a stylist like Arnold should find Emerson below the mark. I suppose your friend Morris would find Arnold about right in that exception. But there 's a higher thing than the pure stylist can ever know." Spoke as before

     W. discovered in the big book the first mistake: in Collect, page 240, line 15, changed "I think if" to "Truly if we." Asked W. if he had read Sunset Cox's Mohammedanist book. No. Not even Why We Laugh. I had Why We Laugh. Said: "It would be tonic for you." "Probably," he said: "why not bring it down one of these days? One is not forced to read, not forced to take up, not forced to put down: try me with it." He "could imagine" a "good" book from Cox. "Cox is the sort of fellow who sets out for brightness—lambency: the epigram, the gem, the smart saying—brilliant flash: the stream sparkling dazzling—the background of all: not a mind of the first class: yet important, necessary." Had he read Brown to-day?—Wieland? He said: "No—not really read it: yet I looked it honestly over—looked through the whole story." The story "had no attraction" for him. But the introductory life of Brown—"that I read squarely through." I asked: "Who wrote it?" W. said: "I don't know: it does not say: it is tepid: not strong, not weak: not interesting, not dull: flat, to sum it up. It deals with Brown conservatively—is neither hot nor cold: it is not a piece of writing such as Macaulay could make of Milton, Hastings, or Arnold of Heine." Lament for O'Connor. "No word at all—which is a bad word: yet I write to him—send him papers—the Boston papers." I asked about O'Connor's wife. W. exclaimed: "Tiptop! intellectual, true, noble: rather consumptively inclined, I should say—rather, not wholly that: has some pulmonary weakness." O'Connor, he said, "though a man now over fifty, and tremendously a sufferer, is still young in spirit: his letters, his talk, his public writings—all show it. That is his vehement, passionate, sincere temperament." He considered that "if O'Connor had been a priest back in the earlier Christian ages his noble, lofty, extreme personality would have roused nations, stirred conti-

     I met a radical Friend to-day. He talked of Hicks—I of Whitman's Hicks. At the mention of W.'s name, the old Quaker looked me. W. evidently only a half-known name to him. "He 's the fellow who wrote a smutty book?" Then he asked: "Was it smutty?" I retorted: "Smutty people consider it smutty!" The old fellow quite gracefully withdrew: "I thought that might be the case," he said. W. interested in this and what further I had to say. "It was my grandfather," he remarked, "who best knew Hicks: they hobnobbed together in their young days: but my father had met him—known him—also, as he did Thomas Paine: I myself saw Hicks: what is more, I saw his surroundings, the country he travelled, the people—associates, followers: this, to me, most valuable, I may say, in explaining, justifying Hicks." "In this way by long contemplation of habitats and so forth I have come to think of myself as intimate with Elias as a person: have came more to understand in my own late days that you can mainly get to know a man's life by incidents, environment, parentage." "I feel now that I know more of Elias Hicks by standing a little off: I take a sounder, fuller view—more fairly estimate him." "However grievous the fact Hicks is to-day practically forgotten: the general world requires when he is

     I had read aloud. W. expressed some personal things about Carpenter and the Fords: "The altogether beautiful