while Lowell’s well-known verses, “On Board the Seventy-six,” referred to his editorial words of cheer during the gloomy early days of the Civil War. A little more than three years later (Jan. 30, 1868), a dinner was tendered Bryant at Delmonico’s as president of the American Free Trade League. Speeches were made in his honor by David Dudley Field, Parke Godwin, John D. Van Buren, and others, and letters read from Emerson and Gerrit Smith. Again, on Nov. 3, 1874, when Bryant became eighty years old, he was quietly finishing a forenoon’s work in the _Evening Post_ office when a deputation of friends entered to congratulate him. That evening there was another celebration at the Century Club, at which a commemorative vase--now in the Metropolitan Museum--was given Bryant, while a simultaneous celebration was held in Chicago by the Literary Club of that city. In the dozen years following Sumter, and especially in the Civil War years when it pressed its demand for energetic prosecution of the struggle, the _Evening Post_ was at the height of its influence under Bryant. “The clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government in this war than some of its armies,” said _Littell’s Living Age_ in 1862. Charles Dudley Warner wrote at the same time in the Hartford _Press_: “The _Evening Post_ is the most fearless and rigidly honest paper in the country, and its ability is equal to its moral worth. Some of its ordinary editorials are magnificent specimens of English.” A chorus of praise was aroused by the enlargement of the journal this year. “_The Evening Post_, we think, is the best newspaper in the United States,” remarked the Elmira _Advertiser_; the New Bedford _Standard_ spoke of “the best paper in the United States, the _Evening Post_”; the Kennebec _Journal_ said that “All things considered, it comes the nearest to our idea of what a metropolitan journal should be of any publication in the country”; and the _Christian Enquirer_ testified that “the course of the _Evening Post_ during the war has been above all praise--firm, bold, patriotic, and wise.”