For a time Mitchell was editor of the ‘Atlantic Almanac’ (1868–69), and for one year (1869) editor of ‘Hearth and Home.’ He served as one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition (1876), and was a United States commissioner at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He has lectured much on literature and art. Yale recognized his achievements in letters by conferring on him, in 1878, the degree of LL. D. He is one of the most attractive figures of our time, not alone because of his unaffected goodness, his charm of manner, his literary reputation, but because he is the last survivor of a group of writers who in the Fifties made New York famous, and about whose association there still clings a very attractive atmosphere of romance. II THE AUTHOR AND THE MAN A critic who was given a copy of _Dream Life_ and asked to draw the character of the author therefrom, might possibly come to conclusions like these. ‘Ik Marvel,’ he would say, must be very generous, sympathetic with respect to the lesser weaknesses of human nature, and charitable towards the greater, or else this book is a falsehood from beginning to end. He must be very manly, for in all its two hundred pages there is not a cynical note or a sneer. He must be humorous, or he could not have written the chapters on ‘A New England Squire’ and ‘The Country Church,’ to say nothing of the account of the loves of Clarence and Jenny. He must be sentimental, or the chapter entitled ‘A Good Wife’ had been an impossibility. At every point the book betrays its Puritan origin. ‘Ik Marvel’ is a moralist. He makes a direct and constant appeal to the ethical sentiment. In one of his prefaces he mentions the fact--doubtless an amused smile played about his lips as he wrote the lines--that _Dream Life_ has sometimes insinuated itself into Sunday-school libraries. He hopes it has ‘worked no blight there.’ At all events, ‘there are six days in the week ... on which its perusal could do no mischief.’ Doubtless the moral lessons are commonplace enough, but their triteness is relieved by the literary quality. Puritanism without its narrowness, and sentimentalism controlled by humor and good sense, lie at the basis of _Reveries of a Bachelor_ and _Dream Life_. The character of their author is to be plainly if not completely read in these two books.