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Chapter 8: personal qualities
That acute, if not always impartial, observer,
Mr. George W. Smalley, says of the most famous of modern English Quakers, John Bright, “There was no courtlier person than this
Quaker, none whose manners were more perfect. ... If there had been no standard of good manners, he would have created one. . . .
Swift said, ‘Whosoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best-bred man in the company.’
”
London letters, I. 124.
Tried by this last standard, at least,
Whittier was unsurpassed; and living in
America, where artificial standards are at least secondary, he never found himself misplaced.
The relation between himself and others rested wholly on real grounds, and could be more easily computed.
Personally I met him first in 1843, when the excitement of the “
Latimer case” still echoed through
Massachusetts, and the younger abolitionists, of whom I was one, were full of the joy of eventful living.
I was then nineteen, and saw the poet for the first time at an eating-house known as
Campbell's, and then quite a resort for reformers of all sorts, and incidentally of economical college students.
Some one near me said, “There is
Whittier.”
I saw before me a man of striking personal appearance; tall, slender, with olive complexion, black hair, straight,
