Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

DANA AND HIS PEOPLE

209

industrious pen pouring out its minutely lettered copy
week after week, month after month, year after year,
without holiday, vacation, or intermission except during
illness, probably earned more money in thirty-three or
thirty-four years than any other journalist, before or
after him, working under the same conditions of employment. He was a De Quincey raised to the nth power of
productivity. I have little doubt that he achieved more
millions of printed words during his lifetime than Walter
Scott and Dumas senior together, with De Quincey
thrown in. At one time he was writing not only for The
Sun but for George Harvey's North American Review and
Harper's Weekly, for Collier's and heaven knows what
periodicals besides; book-reviews, editorials, international
politics, learned dissertations, pamphlets on social topics,
articles on miscellaneous subjects foreign and domestic;
all of uniform quality, never padded, fully charged with
thought, matter no sensible editor would think of rejecting unless for reasons of policy. That was one side of him,
the side of quantity.
Mayo W. Hazeltine's extraordinary career in journalism
is worth for reminiscence not merely a few paragraphs
but a good-sized volume. After graduation in arts in 1862
and a law course at Harvard he studied at Cambridge
University in England and travelled much in Europe,
particularly in Spain. Whatever he saw or read he remembered. The retentive faculty of his mind was like
that of Paschal or Grotius or Macaulay. It held with
equal tenacity objective facts and subjective ideas; and
at the same time unconsciously so systematized the arrangement of the vast store that the least thing in stock
was ready for use on demand. When the Revised Version

of the New Testament appeared Hazeltine was ill at
Atlantic City, away from his own books and with no adequate library available for reference. Nevertheless, he
produced at sudden call, from the resources of unaided