John Bright once said:  “Horace Greeley is the greatest of living editors.”  He once told me that he had written editorials for a dozen papers at one time.  He also told me that while he was preparing his history of the “American Conflict” he was in the habit of writing three columns of editorials every day.  His articles were freighted with great power, for he was one of the strongest writers of the English language on this continent.  They were always brimful of thought, for Mr. Greeley seldom wrote on any subject which he had not thoroughly mastered.  Speaking of a certain popular orator, who afterwards went as our minister to China, he said to me:  “Mr. B.——­ is a pretty man, a very pretty man, but he does not study, and no man ever can have permanent power in this country unless he studies”

Mr. Greeley prided himself upon his accuracy as an editor, but one day, when writing an editorial, in which he denounced some political misdemeanor in the County of Chatauqua, by a slip of his pen he wrote the name of the adjoining county Cattaraugus.  The next morning when he saw it in the paper he went up into the composing room in a perfect rage and called out, “Who put that Cattaraugus?” The printers all gathered around him amused at his anger until one of them pulling down from the hook the original editorial showed him the word “Cattaraugus” “Uncle Horace,” when he saw the word, with a most inexpressible meekness, drawled out:  “Will some one please to kick me down those stairs?”

He abominated mendicancy and, although his native goodness of heart often led him to give to the hundreds who came to him for pecuniary aid, he one day said to me:  “Since I have lived in New York I have given away money enough to set up a merchant in business, and I sometimes doubt whether I have done more good or harm by the operation.  I am continually beset by various clubs and societies all over the land to donate to them the Tribune.  I always tell them if it is worth reading it is worth paying for.  The curse of this country is the deadhead.  I pay for my own Tribune every morning.”

From my old friend’s theology I strongly dissented, but in practical philanthropy he gave me many a lesson and still better stimulant of his own unselfish example.  He was always ready to work in the cause of reform without pay and without applause.  When temperance meetings were held in my church he very gladly lent his effective services, refusing any compensation, and there was no man in the city whose evening hours were worth more in solid gold than his.  It is said that he was once called upon, in the absence of his minister, in a Universalist Church, to go into the pulpit.  He did so, and delivered a very pungent sermon on the text, “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.”  The strongest points made by Mr. Greeley in the best of his printed essays are those which emphasize the authority of God.  A letter in his characteristic hieroglyphics, the