Recollections of a Long Life: An AutobiographyCuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Religion
Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography
Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Clergy -- United States -- Biography; Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard), 1822-1909
He quite captivated her with a most pathetic
account of his idolized boy "Pickie," who had died a short time before.
Mr. Greeley was one of the most simple-hearted, great men whom I have
ever met; without a spark of ordinary vanity he was intensely
affectionate in his sympathies and loved a genuine kind word that came
from the heart. He relished more a quiet talk with an old friend in his
home at Chappaqua than all the glare of public notoriety. "Come up," he
often said to me, "and spend a Saturday at the farm. The good boys do
come and see me up there sometimes." Probably no man lived a purer life
than Horace Greeley. He was the most devoted of husbands to one of the
most eccentric of wives. His defenses of the spiritual sanctity of
marriage in reply to Dale Owen are among the most powerful productions
of his ever powerful pen. It were well that they should be reproduced
now at a time when the laxity of wedlock and the wicked facilities for
divorce are working such peril to our domestic life.
John Bright once said: "Horace Greeley is the greatest of living
editors." He once told me that he had written editorials for a dozen
papers at one time. He also told me that while he was preparing his
history of the "American Conflict" he was in the habit of writing three
columns of editorials every day. His articles were freighted with great
power, for he was one of the strongest writers of the English language
on this continent. They were always brimful of thought, for Mr. Greeley
seldom wrote on any subject which he had not thoroughly mastered.
Speaking of a certain popular orator, who afterwards went as our
minister to China, he said to me: "Mr. B.---- is a pretty man, a very
pretty man, but he does not _study_, and no man ever can have permanent
power in this country unless he _studies_"
Mr. Greeley prided himself upon his accuracy as an editor, but one day,
when writing an editorial, in which he denounced some political
misdemeanor in the County of Chatauqua, by a slip of his pen he wrote
the name of the adjoining county Cattaraugus. The next morning when he
saw it in the paper he went up into the composing room in a perfect rage
and called out, "Who put that Cattaraugus?" The printers all gathered
around him amused at his anger until one of them pulling down from the
hook the original editorial showed him the word "Cattaraugus" "Uncle
Horace," when he saw the word, with a most inexpressible meekness,
drawled out: "Will some one please to kick me down those stairs?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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