Page retired from the editorship of the Forum in 1895.  The severance of relations was half a comedy, half a tragedy.  The proprietors had only the remotest relation to literature; they had lost much money in the enterprise before Page became editor and only the fortunate accident of securing his services had changed their losing venture into a financial success.  In a moment of despair, before the happier period had arrived, they offered to sell the property to Page and his friends.  Page quickly assembled a new group to purchase control, when, much to the amazement of the old owners, the Forum began to make money.  Instead of having a burden on their hands, the proprietors suddenly discovered that they had a gold mine.  They therefore refused to deliver their holdings and an inevitable struggle ensued for control.  Page could edit a magazine and turn a shipwrecked enterprise into a profitable one; but, in a tussle of this kind, he was no match for the shrewd business men who owned the property.  When the time came for counting noses Page and his friends found themselves in a minority.  Of course his resignation as editor necessarily followed this little unpleasantness.  And just as inevitably the Forum again began to lose money, and soon sank into an obscurity from which it has never emerged.

The Forum had established Page’s reputation as an editor, and the competition for his services was lively.  The distinguished Boston publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company immediately invited him to become a part of their organization.  When Horace E. Scudder, in 1898, resigned the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, Page succeeded him.  Thus Page became the successor of James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William D. Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as the head of this famous periodical.  This meant that he had reached the top of his profession.  He was now forty-three years old.

No American publication had ever had so brilliant a history.  Founded in 1857, in the most flourishing period of the New England writers, its pages had first published many of the best essays of Emerson, the second series of the Biglow papers as well as many other of Lowell’s writings, poems of Longfellow and Whittier, such great successes as Holmes’s “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the early novels of Henry James.  If America had a literature, the Atlantic was certainly its most successful periodical exponent.  Yet, in a sense, the Atlantic, by the time Page succeeded to the editorship, had become the victim of its dazzling past.  Its recent editors had lived too exclusively in their back numbers.  They had conducted the magazine too much for the restricted audience of Boston and New England.  There was a time, indeed, when the business office arranged the subscribers in two classes—­“Boston” and “foreign”; “Boston” representing their local adherents, and “foreign” the