By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion and appreciation. He grasped it historically and æsthetically long before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy of taste--the best of the time--and La Farge himself was French save for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and fine feeling. “He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention,” according to his long-time friend Henry Adams. The story of his birth and education reads somewhat romantically to-day, though it was only yesterday that he was here. His father as a young man was an officer in the French navy and had been sent to Santo Domingo, during an uprising there, to seize Toussaint the revolutionist. The enterprise went against him, but he escaped the general massacre that followed and eventually found himself a refugee in the United States. He did not return to France, but instead went into sugar-growing in Louisiana, acquired property in New York, and married there a daughter of M. Binsse de St. Victor, a Santo Domingo sugar-planter, who, like himself, had been driven from the island by the uprising under Toussaint. These French refugees were La Farge’s parents and he, himself, was born in Beach Street, near St. John’s Church, in 1835. The house was in what has latterly been called old New York and La Farge never entirely got out of that quarter. During his life he did not live above Tenth Street. His parents were very cultivated people and as a boy La Farge’s education was precisely guided. His father was a rather severe type and instilled rugged principles. He was a good teacher, and the pupil was brought up to do exact thinking. In his reading he was not permitted to roam at large. He tells us in his letters and communications to Mr. Cortissoz, whose admirable account I am paraphrasing,[8] that as a child he read French and English, read St. Pierre, Rousseau, Bossuet, Homer, De Foe, Voltaire--certainly an odd lot of authors for childish consumption. The house was full of books--Molière, Racine, Corneille, Cervantes, Byron--some of them illustrated with handsome Turneresque engravings, which no doubt had quite as much influence on the boy as the printed texts. The outlook of his parents was large and La Farge grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas. [8] _John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study_, by Royal Cortissoz, Boston, 1911.