USA > Vermont > Vermonters : a book of biographies > Part 10
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Webster's DICTIONARY from G. and C. Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts, for he realized that the publishers whose printing he had done would naturally not care to give work to one who had become a competitor. The new firm specialized in standard literature and in law books, and continued under the style of Hurd and Houghton, until 1878, when Hurd withdrew, and Houghton combined with James R. Osgood and Company, the successors of two famous publishing houses; Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood and Company-a step that made Houghton the publisher of all the great New England writers,-Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, -- and of THE AT- LANTIC MONTHLY, at the moment edited by W. D. Howells and later by T. B. Aldrich, then the best literary magazine issued in America. Houghton seemed always to have gifts in reserve with which to meet new requirements. Just as when he be- came a printer, he showed that he understood printing as an art; so when he became a publisher, he showed that he had a sound theory about the choice of books. "He was not," says Scudder, "in the technical sense a literary critic, and he was perhaps disposed to underestimate the art of literature, but he had a strong sense of what was enduring, and very direct way of appraising books. Especially whatever appealed to the broad, common interest of men and was helpful in its character commended itself to his judgment." For the permanent success of a publishing house, there is no safer criterion in the choice of books than that.
In 1880, Osgood retired, and Mifflin, a man long in Hough- ton's employ and since 1872 a partner, a man, moreover, whose pride lay in the making of beautiful books, assumed a leading place in the firm, which from that time on was known as Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Houghton was now at the " apogee of his career; he had created a publishing house that had no superior in the literary quality or in the workmanship of its books. What will strike anyone who reads the story of the rise of his great business is that it grew from small beginnings
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without a break and without a pause; its growth seems as in- evitable and natural a process as that by which an acorn becomes an oak. And the secret-it is a secret worth knowing-lies in that illusive thing that we name character. It was a strong business because its backbone was a strong man.
Great as was the labor and singleness of purpose that Hough- ton put into his business career, he still had interest and energy to spare for other things. He was active in the Methodist church to which he had been attached since boyhood. He was superintendent of the Sunday School of the Harvard Street Methodist Episcopal Church during the years 1850-53, an office that he assumed again in 1864, and that he thereafter held until his death. In 1862, he became one of the trustees of the church. He was also active in the schools and in the government of Cambridge; he served the city as a member of the school com- mittee, as a member of the common council and of the board of aldermen, and for one term as mayor. Prompted by the deep interest of his wife-she was Nana W. Manning, a Cambridge school teacher whom he married in 1854-he became an efficient member of the Indian Rights Association. He was a trustee of Boston University, and chairman of the standing committee of its School of Law. He never lost his deep interest in Vermont. He was one of the founders of the Vermont Association and for several years its president. Finally, no one worked harder or more effectively than he in the cause of international copyright when it had to be pleaded before the Congress. He died on August 25, 1895, in the seventy-third year of his age.
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HENRY NORMAN HUDSON
By Charles B. Wright
T WHAT Henry Norman Hudson is easily first among Shake- L speare critics in America and the acknowledged peer of such critics everywhere, may well be for Vermonters a cause of pride. He was born in Cornwall, Addison County, Jan. 28, 1814, and was graduated from Middlebury College in 1840. Ordained to the Episcopal ministry in 1849, he was editor of the CHURCH- MAN and the CHURCH MONTHLY from 1852 to 1857, a rector in Litchfield, Connecticut, from 1858, to 1860, and for three years the chaplain of a New York regiment in the Civil War. Through all these years of varied activity, however, a love of Shakespeare had been his master passion. While teaching in the West during the four years that followed his graduation, he had lectured with great success in the principal southern cities. His first lecture in Boston was delivered in 1844, and his first edition of the plays appeared in 1851. After 1865, and until his death in 1886, he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, devot- ing himself chiefly to the Shakespearean studies that, even as an undergraduate, had so absorbed him.
The narrative of Henry Hudson's early life, and of the train- ing that brought him to graduation in his twenty-seventh year, while by no means unusual is of great interest. During boy- hood on a farm, his only educational opportunities were those afforded by a district school. At eighteen years of age he be- came apprenticed to a coach-maker, with whom he remained three years and in whose family he lived. It was this master who recognized the intelligence and ambition of the youth, and suggested that he prepare for college. He secured this prepara- tion himself, with no assistance other than occasional advice from the local minister, and in 1836 he entered Middlebury. The story of the shoes carried in his hand, for economy's sake, as he
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walked back and forth between the college and his home, has held its own among Middlebury traditions.
His college years were quiet, studious ones. He was older than most of his classmates, and of a diffident nature, but those who came to know him found that he had a strength of con- viction and a skill in the presentation of his thoughts that marked him, in their judgment, as a man of unusual promise.
That promise was abundantly fulfilled. As a lecturer, the charm of his personality and the unconventional freshness of his interpretative work combined from the very first to win him friends. Those were the palmy days of the lyceum, and Hud- son soon became as popular as Emerson himself in the lecture courses of the great cities. In printed form, these lectures met with such favor in 1848 that a second edition was called for within a year, and from these editions the step to the 1851 edi- tion of the plays was logical and easy.
The crowning work of Hudson's literary life is doubtless SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE, ART, AND CHARACTERS, published in 1872 . .. the greatest work, it has been said, in the field of the aesthetic criticism of Shakespeare yet produced in this coun- try, and the equal of the best by English and German scholars. It is on the aesthetic side, indeed, rather than on the textual, that we find what gives to Hudson's work its perennial importance. It was his frank contention that in diffusing and promoting Shakespeare study-his own supreme ambition-the aesthetic criticism of Coleridge, Schlegel, Lamb, and Hazlitt had probably done more than all the verbal criticism of the world put together. It is important, therefore, to learn the judgment of scholars as to the degree of his success. That judgment is exceptionally favorable. When the Harvard SHAKESPEARE was issued, it elicited unstinted praise from eminent Shakespeareans on both sides of the water. Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall gave as the three best guides for students, Gervinus of Heidelberg, Dowden of Dublin, and Hudson of Boston; and Doctor Furness, in ordering sets of it to be sent to the English Shakespeare Memorial Li-
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brary and the library of the German Shakespeare Society, wrote: "I scarcely know how I can better show my high appreciation of this noble edition than by placing it where English and Ger- man scholars can have free access to it and learn from it the wealth of love and learning which in this country is dedicated to Shakespeare." Edwin Booth and Sir Henry Irving testified that the studies of Hudson had proved for them more helpful than those of any other commentator-a convincing evidence of their practical quality.
Next to Shakespeare, the authors that Hudson most delighted to expound were Wordsworth, Burke, and Webster. His ad- miration for Webster was so unbounded, and the quality of his utterances regarding Webster had been so notable, that his class- mate, Edward J. Phelps, then president of the Webster Historical Society, turned to him in 1882 as the man best fitted for bio- grapher: That the task would have been worthily performed, no one can doubt who has read the address delivered by Mr. Hud- son on the centennial of Webster's birth. The materials for the biography had been gathered and were waiting only to be fused into form, when death came unexpectedly, following a surgical operation, soon after his last public appearance in a lecture on CYMBELINE at Wellesley College. Best, perhaps, of the many tributes evoked was that written from the legation of the United States at London by his eminent and lifelong friend, the Am- basador to the Court of St. James: "Student, scholar, gentleman, Christian, happy in his family, his friendships, his distinguished reputation, his well-earned success: not many reach the limits of three-score and ten with so much to be thankful for, so little to deplore." Happy, too, the college that can count within a single class the praiser and the praised. Nor has that college been unmindful of her distinguished son. In 1881 she conferred upon him the doctorate, and on a bronze tablet in the Old Chapel are inscribed the words: Within these walls Henry Norman Hud- son, lover of noble English and interpreter of Shakespeare, began the studies that have won the praise of scholars.
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WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT
By Charles E. Crane
A T the corner of Main and High streets, Brattleboro, there was born a man who is said to be the only Vermonter whose name is enrolled in the Hall of Fame in New York. There are many notable natives of this state who were equally famous in one field or another, but in art, and particularly in the art of painting, there is no Vermonter and scarcely any American who exerted more influence on the art life of this country than William Morris Hunt. He was born in Brattle- boro on March 31, 1824; and following his tragic death from drowning near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 8, 1879, he was buried in the Prospect Hill cemetery, on the brow of the hill overlooking Brattleboro and the Connecticut River valley. His grave is beside that of his father, Hon. Jonathan Hunt, who during the last years of his life was a member of Congress, and who died in Washington in 1832 when his promising son William was eight years of age. Be- sides William, Mr. Hunt left four other children who were to make some mark in the world.
Inheriting an artistic temperament from his mother, who was Jane Leavitt, daughter of Judge Leavitt of Suffield, Con- necticut, he was encouraged by her to follow his natural bent, and shortly after Mrs. Hunt was left a widow with five child- ren, she removed to New Haven, Connecticut, where the ten-year-old William received his first lessons in art from an Italian, Signor Gambella. Not content with this, his ambitious mother took him to Europe, in the days when such an adven- turė was far more audacious than now, and exposed her son to the influences of European culture. It was planned that Hunt should become a pupil of Pradier, a certain well-known artist in Paris, but it was by chance that the young man saw in
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a street window a painting of THE FALCONER, by Thomas Couture, which made such an impression upon the young American artist that he entered Couture's atelier and soon be- came the cleverest painter of his class.
There may be many who are ignorant of Hunt's genius, but there can be scarcely anyone who does not know the work of Jean François Millet, the French peasant painter, whose pic- tures of THE ANGELUS, THE SOWER, THE REAPER, THE SHEP. ERDESS, and many others are today popular pictures in American homes. It may be said that the Brattleboro artist, Mr. Hunt, was the first discoverer of Millet's genius. In Hunt's early days in France he found the struggling Millet, with a family of half a dozen children, painting in a barn which was so damp that the canvases mildewed. At first sight there sprang up, not from pity alone but from a true appreciation of Mil- let's genius, such a warm freindship that Millet himself later testified that the greatest friend that he ever had was the American, Mr. Hunt. On the occasion of the first visit Hunt found Millet painting a picture of THE SOWER. Hunt urged a dealer to acquire this picture as it represented real art. The dealer demurred and Hunt himself purchased the picture for sixty dollars, a sum which the struggling French artist had to turn directly over to a creditor to pay for his colors. Hunt not only bought several of Millet's earliest works, but, what was more, he stoutly defended Millet's genius against the ridicule of short-sighted art writers of that day who scorned Millet's pictures of "clodhopper countrymen," although some of the pictures thus scorned were later to be sold for thousands of dollars and to become popular the world over.
Hunt's friendship with Millet was such that he and the Frenchman both donned the blue blouse of the French peas- ant, wore wooden shoes, and for five years lived in intimacy at Barbizon, the little village thirty miles from Paris, which was later to attract many other admirers of Millet's genius and to become the seat of a new school of painting, known as
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the Barbizon school. Many of Hunt's own paintings show some of the Millet influence, but he was later to become more famous in his own right after returning to his own country as the American portrait painter. For many years, nearly a century ago, Hunt occupied something of the same position in the art world as did the famous John Sargent, of the past generation. With headquarters in Boston he became in great demand socially and artistically, for he not only painted scores of notable portraits but was prevailed upon to conduct for several years a school of painting in Boston, which was one of the first painting schools in the country, and which had a lasting influence on American art.
In the court house at Salem, Massachusetts, there may be seen today the imposing portrait of Chief Justice Shaw which is probably one of the finest of Hunt's achievements as a portrait painter. The courthouse at Salem is the mecca of many an artistic pilgrimage for the sole purpose of seeing this remarkable picture. It is often likened to the portraits of Velasquez. But in addition to portrait work, Mr. Hunt showed skill both as a landscape painter, a sculptor, and mural artist. In the latter part of his career he was honored with a commis- sion to do mural work in the beautiful State Capitol at Al- bany, and rose to this occasion as John Sargent did in the decoration of the Boston Library.
In the great Boston fire of 1872 Hunt's studio was destroyed and some of the choicest of his pictures and some of his origin- als of Millet went up in flames, so that there is left to pos- terity a less representative collection of his work than there ought to be. But there are between two hundred and three hundred Hunt paintings in existence, and there have been several occasions when the majority of these have been brought together for exhibition in his honor. The one im- portant example of his work left to Brattleboro is THE PRODIGAL SON, presented to the Brattleboro Library by his sister, Miss Jane Hunt. This picture was painted in Paris in a studio which
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Hunt occupied jointly with Thomas Couture, and is one of the most striking examples of the artist's early methods.
GEORGE JONES
By Edward F. Crane
"N days when newspapers are full of stories about crime I waves, racketeers, corrupt officials, and the power of money to keep criminals out of jail, Vermonters may well be proud of the fact that a native of the Green Mountain State, once re- fused $5,000,000 to suppress publication of certain docu- ments damaging to the infamous Tweed ring in New York City.
The man was George Jones, financial backer of Henry J. Raymond in the founding of the NEW YORK TIMES, and for forty years associated with that great newspaper. It seems more than a coincidence that three men who played an im- portant part in the early days of New York journalism, Henry J. Raymond, George Jones, and Horace Greeley, founder of the TRIBUNE, should have been so closely associated with Ver- mont. While Raymond was born across the lake in Lima, New York, he was graduated from the University of Vermont.
George Jones was born in Poultney, Vermont, August 16, 1811. His father came from Wales to settle in Poultney about 1798.
In his boyhood, George worked as a clerk in a store owned by Amos Bliss, who was also proprietor of a newspaper called THE NORTHERN SPECTATOR. Horace Greeley was a typesetter on this newspaper and he and George became close friends.
In 1824, when George was only thirteen, both his father and mother died. The boy went to Burlington, then to Al- bany, New York, and New York City.
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Meanwhile Greeley had also gone to New York and he obtained for the young man a job in a dry goods store in 1833.
Greeley's first venture in New York journalism, had failed, but a little later, Greeley founded the TRIBUNE. George Jones at first declined an interest in the TRIBUNE, but later took the position of business manager. It was while in the TRIBUNE office that Jones first met Henry J. Raymond and there sprang up a very close friendship between these two.
Later Jones established a news agency in Albany and with the profits started a banking business. Mr. Raymond, went to Albany as a member of the State Assembly, and then it was that he and the banker began to talk seriously about founding a new paper in New York.
The matter was settled during the winter of 1850-51, as Raymond and Jones were walking together on the ice of the Hudson River, near Albany. It was agreed that Mr. Raymond should become the editor and Mr. Jones the publisher and financial manager. The business firm was called Raymond, Jones & Co.
The capital of the TIMES was $100,000, but all of this was not required at the start. The subscribers to the stock, and the proportions held by each, were: Henry J. Raymond, twenty shares; George Jones, twenty-five shares; E. B. Wes- ley (who had been a partner of Jones in the banking business), twenty-five shares; J. B. Plumb, Daniel B. St. John and Fran- cis B. Ruggles, all of Albany, five shares each; and E. B. Morgan and Christopher Morgan, of Aurora and Auburn, New York, respecticely, two shares each.
Due to Mr. Jones, and to the men who were associated with him, the twenty shares of stock assigned to Mr. Raymond were presented to him.
The NEW YORK DAILY TIMES, published first as a morning and evening paper, appeared for the first time on September 18, 1851, and sold for one cent a copy. At the end of a year
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of fierce competition with other New York papers, it had built up a circulation of 26,000.
It was not paying, however, and Jones advanced the price to two cents. The circulation soon fell to 18,000, but Jones maintained the price, and the paper soon began to pay.
After a brilliant career both in journalism and in Congress, Mr. Raymond died in 1869. Throughout these years, it was the energy and well-directed skill, the capacity and integrity of Mr. Jones that kept the paper financially successful. After a brief interval under the management of John Bigelow, formerly of the EVENING POST, and later United States Minister to France, Mr. Jones took over the general supervision of edi- torial management as well as the financial affairs of the paper. This arrangement held to the time of Mr. Jones' death, which occurred August 12, 1891, just before his eightieth birthday, at Poland Springs, Maine.
Under the direction of Mr. Jones, a new building was erected for the TIMES during 1886 to 1890, the new structure going up around the shell of the old one without interrupting for a day the orderly publication of the paper.
Fully dominated by the idea that a journal should never con- sider the mere money question as the arbiter of its policy, Mr. Jones saw more than once the circulation of the TIMES tem- porarily diminished because he had committed himself to a policy at variance with popular opinion.
In 1870 he started his war against the Tweed ring and thwarted one of the most gigantic schemes in history to de- fraud a city. When the figures which exposed the crim- inality of the Tweed ring were in the possession of the TIMES, the emissaries of the ring made a proposition to Mr. Jones to sell them the paper, intimating that he had better accept that offer or do worse. Mr. Jones refused it.
A short time later, he was summoned to the office of an attorney in the Times building on the plea of important busi- ness. There he found Richard B. Connolly, Tweed's partner.
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Mr. Jones said he did not care to see Mr. Connolly and started to leave.
"For God's sake, let me say one word to you," exclaimed Connolly.
At this appeal Mr. Jones stopped. Connolly then made an offer of $5,000,000 if Mr. Jones would withhold the publica- tion of the documents he had in his possession.
"I don't think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that," remarked Mr. Jones.
Connolly began to plead and drew a graphic picture of what one could do with $5,000,000.
"Why, with that sum you can go to Europe and live like a prince," he told Mr. Jones.
"Yes," said Mr. Jones, "but I should know that I was a rascal. I cannot consider your offer or any offer not to pub- ish the facts in my possession."
A few days later the proofs of the frauds came out in the TIMES, and were flashed to the four quarters of the globe. The people arose and cast out the Tweed ring. The victory of the TIMES was complete.
It was through the wise forethought of Mr. Jones that General Grant was assured an income during the last years of his troubled life. The two had become close friends and Mr. Jones personally conducted the raising of a fund of $250,000 which made the General's last days brighter.
Mr. Jones was married in 1836 to Sarah M. Gilbert of Troy, New York. They celebrated their golden wedding in 1886. Mrs. Jones survived her husband. Their one son, Gilbert E. Jones, succeeded his father as business manager of the TIMES. Mr. Jones was one of the founders of the Union League of New York. He was a vestryman of All Saint's Protestant Episcopal Church. Upon the death of Mr. Jones, the NEW YORK ASSOCIATED PRESS adopted the following resolution:
The members of the NEW YORK ASSOCIATED PRESS desire to record their testimony to the high character of their late associate, George Jones, -
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of the NEW YORK TIMES. His unswerving integrity, his manly inde- pendence, his intolerance of wrong-doing that lifted him above the tram- mels of party have distinguished him in the ranks of journalism and gave him an honorable name to be held in loving memory for all the coming years.
DARWIN P. KINGSLEY
By Lawrence F. Abbott
B ORN at Alburgh, Vermont, on May 5, 1857, of farming parents, Darwin P. Kingsley was prepared for college in a typical country district school and worked his way, with rigid economy, through the University of Vermont,-an economy which, however, did not prevent his taking an in- fluential part in undergraduate life. He was graduated, A.B. and Phi Beta Kappa in 1881, and later the University con- ferred upon him the honorary degrees of A.M., LL.D. and L.H.D.
Following Horace Greeley's proverbial advice, he went West immediately on his graduation, and was a journalist in Colo- rado until 1887, when he became state auditor and superin- tendent of insurance. His work in these positions of political and financial importance was of such a nature that the New York Life Insurance Company invited him to join its organiza- tion, in pursuit of the policy which has governed it for nearly three-quarters of a century, of summoning to its staff men of expert knowledge and pronounced integrity.
From the rank of inspector of agencies for the New Eng- land States, Mr. Kingsley rose, through various official posi- tions, to the presidency of the company. When he was elected to that office on June 17, 1907, the business of American life insurance was in a state of confusion and disorganization, re-
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sulting from the Armstrong investigation of 1906. To accept the headship of a life insurance company at such a time was a responsibility which inevitably involved many unprecedented anxieties and problems. Mr. Kingsley, however, accepted the task, and with vigor and courage set to work not only to rehabilitate his own company in public confidence but to demonstrate that life insurance is a public service institution of far-reaching importance in the social and economic fabric of American life.
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