When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his way, young Grady was found one day reading Blackstone. His brother asked him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence. He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.