Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves.  Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.  He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature had otherwise known.  He had gone from Cleveland to London, with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there.  We had met in Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple.  He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality, with “How do you do?  When did you come?” and other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces.  Then he seized my hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with an intonation that was now “Why, how are you; how are you?” for me alone.  It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his impending doom:  this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look.  His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. an eagle’s, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb trembled away with him when we parted.  I did not see him again; I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor which characterizes the whole American people.

I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above all others a person of distinction.  He was scarcely a celebrity, but he embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition.  The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere.  It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England.  I had known him by his novel of ‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New York Tribune.  These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least