one.  One thing was immediately apparent; Messrs. Doubleday and McClure, able as they were, would need the help of the best talent available in the work that lay ahead.  The first man to whom they turned was Page, who presently left Boston and took up his business abode at Franklin Square.  The rumble of the elevated road was somewhat distracting after the four quiet years in Park Street, but the new daily routine was not lacking in interest.  The Harper experiment, however, did not end as Mr. Morgan had hoped.  After a few months Messrs. Doubleday, Page and McClure withdrew, and left the work of rescue to be performed by Mr. George Harvey, who, curiously enough, succeeded Page, twenty-one years afterward, in an even more important post—­that of ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.  The one important outcome of the Harper episode, so far as Page was concerned, was the forming of a close business and personal association with Mr. Frank N. Doubleday.  As soon as the two men definitely decided not to assume the Harper responsibility, therefore, they joined forces and founded the firm of Doubleday, Page & Company.  Page now had the opportunity which he had long wished for; the mere editing of magazines, even magazines of such an eminent character as the Forum and the Atlantic Monthly, could hardly satisfy his ambition; he yearned to possess something which he could call his own, at least in part.

The life of an editor has its unsatisfactory aspect, unless the editor himself has an influential ownership in his periodical.  Page now found his opportunity to establish a monthly magazine which he could regard as his own in both senses.  He was its untrammelled editor, and also, in part, its proprietor.  All editors and writers will sympathize with the ideas expressed in a letter written about this time to Page’s friend, Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, already distinguished as the historian of Italian unity and afterward to win fame as the biographer of Cavour and John Hay.  When the first number of the World’s Work appeared Mr. Thayer wrote, expressing a slight disappointment that its leading tendency was journalistic rather than literary and intellectual.  “When you edited the Forum,” wrote Mr. Thayer, “I perceived that no such talent for editing had been seen in America before, and when, a little later, you rejuvenated the Atlantic, making it for a couple of years the best periodical printed in English, I felt that you had a great mission before you as evoker and editor of the best literary work and weightiest thought on important topics of our foremost men.”  He had hoped to see a magnified Atlantic, and the new publication, splendid as it was, seemed to be of rather more popular character than the publications with which Page had previously been associated.  Page met this challenge in his usual hearty fashion.

To William Roscoe Thayer
34 Union Square East, New York,
December 5, 1900.