It is a tradition in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Howells used to exult, on arriving from his Western birthplace, in having at length met for the first time, in Charles Eliot Norton, the only man he had ever seen who had been cultivated up to the highest point of which he was capable. To this the verdict of all Cambridge readily assented. What the neighbors could not at that time foresee was that the man thus praised would ever live to be an octogenarian, or that in doing so he would share those attractions of constantly increasing mildness and courtesy which are so often justly claimed for advancing years. There was in him, at an earlier period, a certain amount of visible self-will, and a certain impatience with those who dissented from him,—he would not have been his father’s son had it been otherwise. But these qualities diminished, and he grew serener and more patient with others as the years went on. Happy is he who has lived long enough to say with Goethe, “It is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent. I see no fault committed which I have not committed myself.” This milder and more genial spirit increased constantly as Norton grew older, until it served at last only to make his high-bred nature more attractive. He was born in Cambridge, November 16, 1827, and died in the very house where he was born, October 21, 1908. He was descended, like several other New England authors, from a line of Puritan clergymen. He was the son of Professor Andrews Norton, of Harvard University, who was descended from the Rev. John Norton, born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1651. The mother of the latter was the daughter of Emanuel Downing, and the niece of Governor John Winthrop. Mrs. Bradstreet, the well-known Puritan poetess, was also an ancestress of Charles Norton. His mother, Mrs. Caroline (Eliot) Norton, had also her ancestry among the most cultivated families in New England, the name of Eliot having been prominent for successive generations in connection with Harvard College. His parents had a large and beautiful estate in Cambridge, and were (if my memory serves me right) the one family in Cambridge that kept a carriage,—a fact the more impressed upon remembrance because it bore the initials “A. & C. N.” upon the panels, the only instance I have ever seen in which the two joint proprietorships were thus expressed. This, and the fact that I learned by heart in childhood Wordsworth’s poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone, or The Fate of the Nortons,” imparted to my youthful mind a slight feeling of romance about the Cambridge household of that name, which was not impaired by the fact that our parents on both sides were intimate friends, that we lived in the same street (now called Kirkland Street), and that I went to dancing-school at the Norton house. It is perhaps humiliating to add that I disgraced myself on the very first day by cutting off little Charlie’s front hair as a preliminary to the dancing lesson.