"Smith" in the January number of the "Atlantic." Plutarch beaten on his own ground!

With our love,

T. B. ALDRICH.

Stedman seems to have returned to the charge, for a week later we find Aldrich writing to him: "I do not see but we agree perfectly on Whitman. My estimate of him was based, not, as you seem half to suspect, on the recollection of his early barbaric yawps, but on a careful study of his complete works. Awhile ago I invested ten dollars in two solid volumes which I should be glad to let any enthusiastic Whitmaniac have at a very handsome reduction. I admire his color and epithets and lyrical outbreaks when I can forget the affectation which underlies it all. There was something large and sunny in Wordsworth's egotism. There is something unutterably despicable in a man writing newspaper puffs of himself. I don't believe a charlatan can be a great poet. I could n't believe it if I were convinced of it!"

With the beginning of 1881 came another event that marked an epoch in the smooth-flowing stream of Aldrich's life. Mr. Howells, who as assistant editor and editor had wielded the trident of the ruler of the "Atlantic" for fifteen years, wearied a little of the toil and resigned his post. Immediately thereupon the natural thing happened, and our poet, who had long before won his editorial spurs, and who had been for a score of years one of the "Atlantic's" most important contributors, was appointed to fill that distinguished "seat of the scorner."

CHAPTER VI

THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY "

1881-1890

T was in the February of 1881 that the arrangement

IT

was made for Aldrich to succeed Mr. Howells in the editorial chair of the "Atlantic." On the twentieth of the month he wrote to Stedman:

"I wanted to write to you - but 'Good God!' as Mr. Samuel Pepys says. Between the 'Atlantic Monthly' business and the storming of my Charles Street house, where an unpaying tenant has intrenched himself and refuses to surrender, I have had my hands full. When I see you, as I hope to do next month in New York, I'll give you the points of the situation. I have a very clear understanding of the responsibilities I have assumed in taking the editorship of the Atlantic.' I accepted the post only after making a thorough examination of my nerve and backbone. I fancy I shall do very little writing in the magazine, at first. I intend to edit it. I am lost in admiration of Howells, who found time to be a novelist."

Edit it he did, and though by a judicious conserving of his work he continued to appear before the public with a volume in nearly every year of his editorship, including in 1885 the "Household" edition of his "complete" poetical

works, he actually wrote little, save for a few poems in lighter vein, and a group of important pieces of the elegiac kind, called forth by the death of Garfield, and of Wendell Phillips, and by the seventieth birthday of Tennyson. Prose he wrote at this time still more sparingly. He did a few critical articles for the "Atlantic," but that was all; and the life of his old chief, N. P. Willis, which he was to have prepared for the American Men of Letters Series, was cheerfully given over to another hand. The story of the years between 1881 and 1890 is a story of winters of editorial routine and of summers of travel.

Even in his editorial office Aldrich contrived to surround himself with the homelike comfort to which he was accustomed. He chose for his purpose a little back room at No. 4 Park Street, reached by a spiral stairway much resembling the pictures of Dante's Purgatorio with the terrestrial Paradise at its summit. Its windows overlooked that haunt of ancient peace, the Old Granary BuryingGround, where, as he liked to say, lay those who would never submit any more manuscript. But any melancholy that might have arisen from the scenery was mitigated by an open fire of cannel coal, by a pipe, - an engine which had not hitherto been in favor in that office, but which was expressly nominated in the bond between the editor and his publisher, and by the constant attendance of his setter, "Trip." Once when Trip ate a sonnet, Aldrich asked, "How did he know it was doggerel?"

Of the daily work in the office the present writer is for