As a writer, Mr. Brann had his faults, but they were the heritage of this God-given son of genius, and with them he climbed the heights and died among the greatest, both of the living and the dead. And had he lived ten years longer, in all probability, the intellectual world would have held him as the grandest writer that this earth has ever known since the days when old Homer painted the matchless beauty of the bride of Menelaus, and told of the godlike courage of the Greek and Trojan as they fought for her, from the Scamander to the sea. While the ignorant, the bigoted and intolerant are rejoicing in his death and garnishing his grave with the slime of their slander, they may be assured that his name and writings will live until the English language dies, and when W. C. Brann is dead and forgotten, so will be Sterne, Smollet, Fielding, Swift, Pope, Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Ben and Sam Johnson, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, George Eliot and all that mighty host that have made the English language what it is. The language that the little tribe of the Angles brought from the forest of Germany to Britain swallowed the Britain, and survived the Norman conquest, and then absorbed both the conqueror and his language. And in the dead centuries of over a thousand years, in every generation has produced some mighty intellect to speed it on in building up the bulwarks of human rights and human liberty, until they have grown so high that despots turn from it with loathing, and slaves cannot speak it. The language of the Magna Charta and the Declaration of American Independence, the two instruments that have spread the bread of liberty before a hungry world. And as a writer of this language, with all its mighty past and greater future. W. C. Brann had few equals and no superiors.