responsibility.  His simple tastes, inexpensive habits, his contempt for the social show and parade which are the chief use made of wealth, and the absorption of his mind in other aims, made it impossible for him to think of the Tribune merely as a source of income, and he always managed it mainly with a view to make it an efficient organ for diffusing opinions which he thought conducive to the public welfare.  It was this which distinguished Mr. Greeley from the founders of other important journals, who have, in recent years, been taken from us.  With him the moral aim was always paramount, the pecuniary aim subordinate.  Journalism, as he looked upon it, was not an end, but a means to higher ends.  He may have had many mistaken and some erratic opinions on particular subjects; but the moral earnestness with which he pursued his vocation, and his constant subordination of private interest to public objects, nobly atone for his occasional errors.

Among the means by which Mr. Greeley gained, and so long held, the first place among American journalists, was his manner of writing.  His negative merits as a writer were great; and it would be surprising to find these negative merits so rare as to be a title to distinction, if observation did not force the faults he avoided so perpetually upon our notice.  He had no verbiage.  We do not merely mean by this that he never used a superfluous word (which, in fact, he rarely did), but that he kept quite clear of the hazy, half-relevant ideas which encumber meaning and are the chief source of prolixity.  He threw away every idea that did not decidedly help on his argument, and expressed the others in the fewest words that would make them clear.  He began at once where the pith of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of stopping the moment he was done; leaving his readers no chaff to sift out from the simple wheat.  This perfect absence of cloudy irrelevance and encumbering superfluity was one source of his popularity as a writer.  His readers had to devour no husks to get at the kernel of what he meant.

Besides these negative recommendations, Mr. Greeley’s style had positive merits of a very high order.  The source of these was in the native structure of his mind; no training could have conferred them; and it was his original mental qualities, and not any special culture, that pruned his writing of verbiage and redundancies.  Whatever he saw, he saw with wonderful distinctness.  Whether it happened to be a sound idea or a crotchet, it stood before his mind with the clearness of an object in sunlight.  He never groped at and around it, like one feeling in the dark.  He saw on which side he could lay hands on it at once with the firmest grasp.  It was his vividness of conception which made Mr. Greeley so clear and succinct a writer.  He knew precisely what he would be at, and he hastened to say it in the fewest words.  His choice of language, though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coarse, was always adapted to his purpose.  He had a great command of racy phrases in common use, and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor.  But these touches were rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and hurried on.