Long-suffering prominence, among its numerous woes, has at times to subject itself to snap-shot portraiture; but occasionally a friendly and amateurish zeal, seeking honest results, brings the person of note to the advantage of a long exposure, and then perchance educes finenesses and personalities neglected by the swifter method. I should like, if I may, to use the slower and truer means in a sketch of Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, who has of late, by reason of an unquestioned reputation, been compelled to stand from behind the vanguard of his books and show himself as a notability. In contrast therefore to various pen views which have presented Mr. Ford as all sorts and conditions of a man, it ought to be possible for a friendly candor to delineate his life and purposes without passing just limitations. Paraphrasing his own playfully bold title, I seek to portray “The True Mr. Ford,” entertaining the while that proportionate sense of demerit which I am sure restrained him as he limned the outlines of Washington. The accrediting of unusual ability to heredity and environment alone fails to satisfy; for what we most wish to understand is the actual and not the probable resultant. Nevertheless it will never do to omit from the reckoning Mr. Ford’s innate tendencies and the slowly formed impulses made upon him and upon his equally remarkable brother, Worthington Chauncey Ford, by their father’s superb library, of which in a manner, but in a different degree, each is the incarnation. Puritan stock, absolutely pure, except where there is a crossing of the Huguenot on the paternal side--there is no choicer graft than that--a temperament stimulated by the nervous excitations of the cosmopolitan life of New York, and a scholarship sound yet unacademic and not held by the leash of college traditions--these, as I see them, are the factors, any of which taken from him would have made Mr. Ford quite other than he is. Yet the aggregate of such components most assuredly does not constitute his genius; for genius as distinguished from marked ability he undoubtedly possesses. It has before now been told that on his mother’s side he is the grandson of Professor Fowler of Amherst, the great-grandson of Noah Webster, and the grandson four times removed of President Charles Chauncey of Harvard College, and of Governor Bradford; and from this last worthy ancestor he comes honestly by his fondness for a manuscript. This is good blood to run through one’s veins, even in a remote generation. There is an added vigor from his mother, who, early expanded under favoring influences, had the native mental strength and moral sureness of a cultivated New England woman. His father, the late Gordon L. Ford, though known and honored as a successful lawyer and man of affairs, was, to those who had the closer knowledge of him, an idealist of the type which does not readily pursue other than the highest ends, and which cannot throw open the reserves of its nature.