It is safe to say that each number of the magazine has had an average of at least five pages of “Easy Chair,” making very nearly or quite two thousand (2,000) pages in all; or a quantity more than sufficient to fill two and a half volumes of the sixty nine (69) thus far issued, each volume containing eight hundred and sixty four (864) pages.  Before beginning to write these delectable tid-bits, he had published “Nile notes of a Howadji,” “The Howadji in Syria,” and “Lotus Eating;” soon after appeared “Potiphar Papers,” “Prue and I,” and “Tramps.”  For twenty years he was constantly on the lecture platform; and for twenty one years he has been the political editor of “Harper’s Weekly.”  Although offered missions to the courts of England and Germany, and other positions of trust and honor, he never accepted; his nearest approach to the holding of any political office was the accepting of an appointment, for a while, of the chairmanship of the “Civil Service Advisory Board.”  As has been well said by George Parsons Lathrop, “The idea often occurs to one that he, more than any one else, continues the example which Washington Irving set:  an example of kindliness and good nature blended with indestructible dignity, and a delicately imaginative mind consecrating much of its energy to public service.”

As for the “Easy Chair,” with me, its leaves are first cut in each fresh number; and while enjoying the last one, I wondered why some deft hand had not culled some of the choicest specimens, and that the Harpers had not given them to the world in a volume by themselves.  They are most certainly worthy of it.  A few passages taken here and there, from these rich fields, will prove this assertion.  The subjects treated in the whole “Easy Chair” number nearly or quite twenty-five hundred (2,500),—­reminiscences of Emerson and Longfellow—­first presentation of a new Oratorios—­a celebrated painting—­the visit of a Lord Chief Justice of England,—­a vast range of topics.  Consult the nine closely printed octavo pages of their titles in the “Index to the first Sixty Volumes”—­from “Abbott, Commodore, xiii. 271,” to “Zurich, University of, xlviii. 443,” and one will be amazed at the great number and variety of themes upon which the “Easy Chair” has had its say.  And it would seem that its occupant has had some similar thoughts to these, for, in a recent number there is a retrospective glance—­a wondering as to what future generations may have to say, and wish to know regarding matters and things of this generation about which it has discoursed: 

“The Easy Chair, mindful of posterity, and of that future loiterer in the retired alcoves of coming libraries who will turn to the pages of an old magazine to catch some glimpse of the daily aspect and the homely fact of our day, which will be then a kind of quaint remembrance, like the ‘Augustan age’ of Anne to Victorian epoch, puts here upon record for his unborn reader—­whom he salutes with hope and Godspeed—­that the winter of 1883-4 in the city of New York was a gray and gloomy season almost beyond precedent, during which the persistent fogs and mists appeared half to have obliterated the sun.”