It has been generally felt, I think, that no disrespect was shown to John Fiske, when the New York “Nation” headed its very discriminating sketch of him with the title “John Fiske, Popularizer”; and I should feel that I showed no discourtesy, but on the contrary, did honor to Horace Elisha Scudder, in describing him as Literary Workman. I know of no other man in America, perhaps, who so well deserved that honorable name; no one, that is, who, if he had a difficult piece of literary work to do, could be so absolutely relied upon to do it carefully and well. Whatever it was,—compiling, editing, arranging, translating, indexing,—his work was uniformly well done. Whether this is the highest form of literary distinction is not now the question. What other distinction he might have won if he had shown less of modesty or self-restraint, we can never know. It is true that his few thoroughly original volumes show something beyond what is described in the limited term, workmanship. But that he brought such workmanship up into the realm of art is as certain as that we may call the cabinet-maker of the Middle Ages an artist. Mr. Scudder was born in Boston on October 16, 1838, the son of Charles and Sarah Lathrop (Coit) Scudder, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 11, 1902. He was a graduate of Williams College, and after graduation went to New York, where he spent three years as a teacher. It was there that he wrote his first stories for children, entitled “Seven Little People and their Friends” (New York, 1862). After his father’s death he returned to Boston, and thenceforward devoted himself almost wholly to literary pursuits. He prepared the “Life and Letters of David Coit Scudder,” his brother, a missionary to India (New York, 1864); edited the “Riverside Magazine” for young people during its four years’ existence (from 1867 to 1870); and published “Dream Children” and “Stories from My Attic.” Becoming associated with Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, he edited for them the “Atlantic Monthly” from 1890 to 1898, preparing for it also that invaluable Index, so important to bibliographers; he also edited the “American Commonwealths” series, and two detached volumes, “American Poems” (1879) and “American Prose” (1880). He published also the “Bodley Books” (8 vols., Boston, 1875 to 1887); “The Dwellers in Five Sisters’ Court” (1876); “Boston Town” (1881); “Life of Noah Webster” (1882); “A History of the United States” for schools (1884); “Men and Letters” (1887); “Life of George Washington” (1889); “Literature in School” (1889); “Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894), besides various books of which he was the editor or compiler only. He was also for nearly six years (1877-82) a member of the Cambridge School Committee; for five years (1884-89) of the State Board of Education; for nine years (1889-98) of the Harvard University visiting committee in English literature; and was at the time of his