If we ask what qualities made Bryant a great editor, we must place mere industry high on the list. Within a few years after his return to the prostrate _Post_ in 1836 he had shaken off his distaste for the profession, and acquired a zest for it. From 1836 to 1866 he labored as hard upon his journal as if he had never written a line of verse--as the hardworking Greeley and Bennett did upon theirs. Always up in summer at five, in winter at five-thirty, he was frequently at his desk at seven, and seldom later than eight. His principal concern, the editorial page, was in itself a day’s work. He took in hand during this period nearly all the leading editorials. They were consistently longer than editorials of to-day, not infrequently in the fifties and sixties reaching 1,600 words, sometimes 1,800; and Bryant, conscious of his reputation, wrote with painful care. “As Dr. Johnson said of his talk,” he once told Bigelow, “I always write _my best_.” But in his first forty years as editor Bryant also attended to a multitude of business and executive details. This was of course true in the thirties and forties, when the _Evening Post_ was a struggling journal with a staff of three or four writers; but his unpublished papers show it almost equally true later. In his late fifties we find him carefully discussing by letter with John Bigelow whether the commercial reporter should get more than $900 a year; hiring the foreign correspondents, and resentful when the _Tribune_ stole one of the best, Signora Jesse White Mario; and taking a keen interest in the fluctuations of advertising. We find him complaining of the daily squabble between the editorial room and advertising department, with the sturdy German head of the composing room, Henry Dithmar, parrying all attempts to displace advertisements by reading matter (1860). He was laying plans as the Civil War storm arose to get out a third edition, to occupy the same ground as the third edition of the _Express_, and considering ways and means of putting the first edition on the street in time to beat the _Commercial_. He kept a watchful eye upon all employees, now meting out praise and blame to the Washington and Albany correspondents, and now deciding indulgently what should be done with an office boy who was caught carrying off a dozen review copies of new books. When it grew necessary to enlarge the _Post_ he knew just what it would cost to alter the “turtles,” and just why the importers and wholesalers preferred a journal of four blanket-size pages to one of eight smaller pages.