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

LATER YEARS ON THE FIRING LINE

369

modest scholar as he used to run his finger along the sharp
arrowhead characters on some baked tablet testament or
a title deed or a butcher's bill from the temple archives
at Nippur, showing in the legal documents the same little
lawyer-like tricks of precautionary phraseology and pleonasm as are employed by the attorneys of five or six thousand years later; and Clay would translate the lingo, too,
more fluently than I myself could read a sentence of easy
German.
After Laffan's death and while Mr. Morgan lived I saw
not a little of this intimidating personage. The previous
ideas of his attitude underwent complete reconstruction.
I found a courtesy that reached into amiability, a regard
for others in matters big and small as genuine as his passion for the possession of a Caxton or a Vermeer or the
original manuscript of "Paradise Lost" or the "Blithedale Romance" or the "Chansons of B6renger," a magnanimity that could either oversee or overlook. At a time
when his desires were influential, I remember no request
or suggestion that was not essentially altruistic, for the
benefit of another than himself or his plans; as, for instance, when he was extremely anxious that a place
should be made, at twenty-five dollars a week, for a
worthy elderly lady of limited means who happened to
know something about teacups, in order that she might
feel that she was earning her living as a writer on ceramics.
And how could it have been otherwise with a whale of
a man who united with the imagination and power that
mastered the mightiest financial undertakings a genuine
affection and hunger for the rarest and finest and most
beautiful achievements of all the arts? Mr. Morgan would

have paid half a million of dollars to add Dido's brooch to
his collection, if satisfied of the genuineness of the object.
At the same time there was in his inmost heart the tender
kindness that would have impelled him, as I verily believe,