The ‘Easy Chair’ papers are urban as well as urbane. Curtis was a city man. We know that he had a summer home in ‘Arcadia’ and was happy there, but his joy in city life is betrayed in almost every paper he wrote. No passionate lover of nature, intent on fringed gentians and purling brooks, penned that description of a gown--‘a mass of pleats and puffs and marvelous trimmings, which, when profusely extravagant upon the form of an elderly woman, always reminds me of signals of distress hung out upon a craft that is drifting far away from the enchanted isles of youth.’ Satirist though he is, Curtis in the ‘Easy Chair’ is always the gentle satirist. He writes of the mannerless sex, of the people who rent boxes at the opera because they can talk better there than at home, of the taste of the town so greedy for minute details of the doings of the rich and the fashionable, but there is no acerbity in his tone. Here is an illustration of his manner. The Cosmopolitan of the ‘Easy Chair’ talks with Mrs. Grundy, who proposes as a great boon to introduce him to a very rich man. ‘“You say he is very rich?” “Enormously, fabulously,” replied Mrs. Grundy, as if crossing herself.’ ‘Trifles light as air’ would be a not inadequate description of hundreds of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers. And they are quite as wholesome as air. VI _ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES_ Curtis’s biographer holds that the volume of reports and addresses on Civil Service reform is ‘in some respects the most valuable of all [his] writings.’[60] The entire collection of _Orations and Addresses_, comprising over a thousand pages, is no less a manual of literary than of civic virtues. A student of the art of expression can well afford to make this book his vade mecum. Here is a body of practical illustration of how to write and how to speak. The oration on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ delivered when Curtis was thirty-two years of age, is an extraordinary performance. Few addresses hold one in the reading like this. What it must have been in the delivery we can but faintly imagine. It is another splendid proof that literature and oratory may occupy a common ground, neither usurping the other’s place. With the amplest use of oratorical arts the speaker makes rhetoric subordinate to thought. It shows fully (does this oration) one marked virtue of Curtis’s public discourse, its perfect urbanity. His speeches were free from invective, from personalities of any sort, from every feature born of mere impulse of the moment. If he was ever tempted to give vigor and point to his phrase by means which must afterward be regretted, temptation never got the better of him.