T EDMUND QUINCY 1808-1877 HERE is a Boston story about a titled English visitor to the house of George Ticknor at the corner of Park and Beacon Streets, looking out of a front window one day, and seeing two passers-by so distinguished in mien and carriage that he abandoned his native reserve long enough to exclaim upon their appearance and even to ask who they were. 'Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy,' was his host's reply. It is not strange that the visitor had not already met the handsome kinsmen - for such they were through Quincy's grandmother, born Abigail Phillips and it is not likely that Ticknor summoned them to any entertainment in his visitor's honor, since at this time, before the Civil War, they were both - as antislavery agitators and reformers at large in ill repute with the highly conservative circle of which George Ticknor was a shining ornament. When the war ended, Phillips turned his reforming zeal into other channels of agitation, of which woman suffrage was one, and consequently remained somewhat outside the Boston circle to which he naturally belonged. It was well after the war, to be sure, that his extraordinary gifts as a speaker won him an invitation to appear at Harvard as a Phi Beta Kappa orator; but the late Dr. E. H. Bradford used to tell his father's experience as one of Phillips's hearers on this occasion to the effect that, finding himself carried away, against his will, by the orator's power, he was yet sufficiently himself (and perhaps sufficiently representative of many other Bostonians of his time) to murmur, as he smote his palms together in violent applause, 'The damned old liar, the damned old liar!' Unlike Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, no less committed to a great variety of reforms in his earlier days, regarded the abolition of slavery as the achievement of the object nearest his heart, and, when the war was done, laid aside his activities as a crusader, contenting himself for the rest of his life, and delighting a large circle of friends and kinsfolk, with his rôle of a charming and talented man of the world, witty, urbane, distinguished. In his young manhood he had studied law, which he never practised - and he enjoyed calling himself a 'reformed lawyer.' In his later life he might have been designated a reformed reformer. It was in this stage of his existence, in 1875-only two years before his death that he became a member of the Saturday Club, as Wendell Phillips never did, and was also elected an Overseer of Harvard College. - From that institution he graduated in 1827, two years before his father, Josiah Quincy, became its President. He was born in Boston, February 1, 1808, the second of his father's two sons. They, and their five remarkable sisters, lived long and actively enough though falling short of their father's ninety-four fruitful years to make both an individual and a collective impression upon their community. Edmund Quincy departed more than any of them from the conventional paths of his time and place. His beginnings were conventional enough at Phillips Academy, Andover, where he was repelled by the ways of orthodoxy, at Harvard College, where he gave full play to his social instincts, and in the study of law, which he abandoned early. Finding himself in command of a sufficient income, he adopted the course thus described by his friend James Russell Lowell: 'Early in life he devoted himself deliberately to the somewhat arduous profession of gentleman, and certainly in the practice of it he achieved as great success as is possible in a country where we have busyness in the blood, and where leisure is looked upon as the larceny of time that belongs to other people.' This course in itself was fairly unconventional for a Bostonian of Quincy's type. He rendered it vastly more so by employing his leisure not merely in literary pursuits, but also in the activities of an extreme reformer. Among his writings two books call for special mention-Wensley, a Story without a Moral,' published in 1854, and characterized by Whittier as 'the most readable book of the kind since Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance," and by Howells in the words, 'it came so near being a first-rate novel'; and the Life of his father (1868), which Lowell regarded as 'clearly the best |