he dealt only in a ponderous kind of logic and built up his speeches as some mighty triphammer might forge an iron mainmast for a man-of-war. His weakness in politics appeared to lie in his want of flexibility and plan of battle. He lacked in the capacity of massing his forces and seizing instantly upon all the strong points of a disputed field. Too much precious time was often wasted upon skirmishes that his scouts might have looked after, or upon reconnoissances which his captains might have controlled. Gifted as he was, these gifts were not at all times homogeneous. With a mind as vivid as a dream, rapid in its encompassments as thought, of wonderful grasp, resource and fertility, it yet did not drive forward straight to the end, knowing neither variableness nor shadow of turning. A pleasant byway was lure enough to take him aside; a rare look put him to dreaming. There were too many unresponsive fibers in his individual make-up ever to permit him to become a successful politician. The harness of the caucus so galled his withers that he would frequently stop short in the middle of the road, refusing thereafter to pull a single pound for either love or money. Of the stronger and more potent elements of leadership he did not possess a single one. Not a few have been the magnificent structures he has erected, only to burn them down or blow them up in a moment of spleen, or disgust, or uncontrollable indignation. For a hot fight under a black flag, where for the wounded there was no surgeon and for the dead no sepulcher, he was incomparable. But if strategy were required solely, if the head alone and not the heart were to dominate the struggle, if only the cold logistics of mathematical maneuvering were to be permitted to the combatants, he was not the man to lead; but what if he could not lead in such a crisis? It is sometimes as vital to destroy as it is to build up.

He wrote one book-the "Crimes of the Civil War" which was fierce, fragmentary, and not unfrequently viciously savage. He wrote another-the "Criminals of the Civil War"-which was, if anything, fiercer and more savage than the other, but it has never been printed. The manuscript was burned at the time his house was, some several years ago, together with a library that was unequaled in Missouri, and which, with nigh on to 10,000 volumes, he had been a lifetime in collecting. His reading was vast, his information almost superhuman, and if such a thing could be possible, or even half-way possible, he had, as it were, the whole recorded history of the world stowed in his mind, and ready to be summoned for any purpose at his bidding. Some of his monologues were only surpassed by those of Napoleon at St. Helena. When the mood was on him he put spells upon people through the sheer force of an intellectual necromancy that forced them to listen even as the guest to the marriage feast was forced to listen by the ancient mariner.

He loved much to talk of the hereafter. He speculated much as to what was beyond the grave. He sought in many ways to penetrate the future, and to get but one bare glimpse of something real and tangible that told of another life. Upon this earth nothing was ever vouchsafed to him. Does he know it all now?

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

[Kansas City Times, March 9, 1887.]

The blow has fallen at last, and the wizard of the pulpit of Plymouth church can no longer conjure a congregation which

adored him. That sleep came upon him which he had so often described, and when he awoke he had solved for himself the great problem of the hereafter. How he strove to do this while yet upon earth. How from under the dark shadow of restless intellectual doubts which come to all men who read and think, and reason, he, yearned for a faith that never wavered. How, when he imagined, in the fervor of an exalted vision, that he saw the porphyry domes, the jasper gates and the golden highways of the New Jerusalem, he looked again, but only on a mirage. How, step by step, he sought for the soul's immortality through every proof that God, or man, or science, or nature, or creed, or conscience, or revealment had furnished, he has best declared in a mountain of discourses as high as Plymouth's steeple.

Did he find before death came to him that perfect peace which can only come from a perfect knowledge? What matters it? He lived the life that was in him, and better than that no man can do who was ever yet born of woman.

With Beecher's final faith or belief, however, we have nothing to do. That was solely a matter between himself and his Creator. The reckoning already has been had, the score been paid, the recording angel's book closed for the present; and somewhere out in the wide, white hush of eternity is a freed spirit waiting for the resurrection.

As a preacher he is the most difficult man to analyze, in an intellectual way, in the United States. At times he had an almost indescribable pathos. Often his irony was superb, but it was the irony of a splendid spiritual digestion, and, therefore, as a balm it always carried with it a touch of amazing grace. Satire helped him upon occasion, but it was not the satire of the scorrer and the hater -it was rather that of one who was fond of a laugh and fond of a story.

Born actor, his mobile face italicised, as it were, each emotion which he wished to make emphatic. Not unfrequently a quaint humor played along the edges of his sermons as a sunbeam along the edges of a storm cloud. Then the lightnings of some terrible denunciations would leap forth, and one saw only the darker and more somber aspect of the sky. In this he was dramatic, but what is intense realism at last if it is not vivid contrast, and the swift intermingling of sunshine and shadow? He surely loved nature as only a passionate lover could love her. He took into the pulpit images of fields where the green corn stood in serried ranks like lines of infantry formed for battle; of summer wheat fields, the south wind bending their bearded heads as though at the touch of its caressing fingers they had bowed as to a benediction; of twilight woods, where nest said good-bye to nest in the gloaming; of apple orchards white and pink with blossoms; of dewy lanes, where on either hand could be heard the weird laughter of the owls in the thickets; of bird and tree and bird and leaf and flower and all sorts of blessed things which filled the heart with reverence and made man in spite of himself lift up his thoughts from nature to nature's God.

In the stronger and terser sense of epigram Mr. Beecher was notably lacking. Weak also in picturesqueness-that sort of picturesqueness which can make one hear the flapping of invisible wings and the swish or the flow of imaginary waters-he yet had what answered almost the same purpose-a quick, entertaining and corruscating fancy. Imagination was also wanting-that sort of imagination which could make one see a sinner being held up over the very mouth of hell and make one smell his very hair scorching.

He could not soar. He never in all his long life, according to our estimate of him as a preacher, preached a really strong, terse, massive, logical sermon. He could take hold of the heart and do with it pretty much what he pleased, but he almost always left the head where he found it. He was utterly incapable of building a massive edifice of thought, perfect in every arch, beam, door, floor, window and rafter-story upon story and stone upon stone; but he could build a beautiful cottage, with lattice-work all about it, and put angels into it, and make honeysuckles form a bower for them in which to play their harps and wave their palms, and decorate it with all sorts of little nooks and crannies, and fill these with all sorts of quaint rugs and rare books and celestial brick-a-brac generally ; but for a fortress that the very wiles of the devil himself could not prevail against through any force of sap, or siege, or stratagem, or cunning-well, some other hands than Mr. Beecher's would have to hew out the rock and rear the structure.

What, then, was his power over his congregation, over his audiences, and over all public bodies with whom he came in contact or before whom he delivered not only sermons but various other kinds of addresses? It was the powerful individuality of the man to begin with, buttressed upon an immense vitality, electricity and personal magnetism. Then he had pathos, knowledge, dramatic capacity in no small degree, all sorts of resources to be summoned at a moment's notice for his apt and apropos illustrations, a forgiving charity for the errors and the frailties of poor human nature, an appositeness in putting things that, while it is not true eloquence, yet does much that real eloquence alone can do-more demagogy than appears at first sight, vividness, perspicacity, anecdote, every art of a finished actor, ease, grace, the poetry of motion, much elocution, and-above all, and beyond all for the purposes for which the gift was given an almost supernatural acquaintance with human nature.

There will be innumerable obituary articles written on the death of this famous American pulpit preacher. He will be discussed from every conceivable standpoint. He has had his share of harsh criticism and indiscriminate laudation. He has gone through some fiery ordeals, and as he himself has sometimes said in moments of unutterable sadness, the way has seemed to be so dreary and dark, and life's burdens so heavy; but, whatever the final judgment may be that his countrymen shall pronounce upon him, both as a man and as a preacher, this should always precede the verdict:

In men whom men condemn as ill

I find so much of goodness still,

In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,

I hesitate to draw the line,
Where God has not.

GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON.

[Kansas City Times, April 10, 1887.1

An equestrian statue, erected to the memory of General Albert Sidney Johnston, has just been unveiled in New Orleans with heartfelt and appropriate ceremonies. Randall Gibson, who commanded a Brigade under him at Shiloh, delivered the memorial address, and Jefferson Davis passed in review his life, his military services and his spotless character.

Albert Sidney Johnston was a man whose ability as a com

mander the soldiers of the Civil War will always love to study. They never tire of asking, one of another, the following questions: If he had lived, would he have driven Grant into the river? If he had lived. would he not have been made commander-in-chief of all the Confederate forces? If he had lived, would he not have finished the battle of Shiloh during the first day's fighting? If he had lived, would he have fulfilled the promise of his earlier years, and would he finally have become the bulwark and the savior of the Southern Confederacy?

These be hard questions to answer. As the Confederacy was organized, it is doubtful if even a Napoleon Bonaparte could have saved it. The politicians got hold of it almost before it had put its armor on. Nothing would do them but a constitution, a congress, a president, a cabinet and a civil administration. Not a single leader in the South, bold or otherwise, arose in his place to demand a dictator. Secession was a mere juggler's term. Some coiner of phrases or quibbler over abstractions invented it. Revolution was the word-stark, inexorable, unmistakable revolution. For this anything else but a dictator was a criminal absurdity. With a president, there would always be an administration and an antiadministration party; with a congress, the outs would be eternally striving to circumvent the ins; with a constitution, the strict constructionists would do little else but fiddle and dance while Rome was burning; with a cabinet, red tape was bound to be a king. A general in the field, to get to his chief authority, would have to traverse as many avenues as there were rat-holes about a granary filled with corn. While armies were crying for arms, ammunition, food, clothing and medicine, cabinet officers would be indexing reports and pointing out how every requisition would have to go through the regular channels, you know.

Johnston fought but one battle before he was killed, that of Shiloh, and he did not fight that to a finish. Up to the momen when a minie-ball cut the femoral artery of his right leg he had everything his own way. His plans were working to perfection. The various subdivisions of his army had taken the ground pointed out to them, and when the designated hour came had entered promptly into the fight. It was not possible for any general to have held his forces better in hand. True, it had been his intention to begin the attack one day earlier than he actually did begin it. but he could not be everywhere at one and the same time, and so, at a most critical period, some of his subordinates failed him. But for this Buell could never have reached Pittsburg Landing in time to succor Grant, no matter whether Johnston had lived or died, nor whether Beauregard had or had not called a halt to rearrange his lines of battle.

That Johnston was a man of splendid administrative ability none have ever denied. That in a military point of view he showed skill of the very highest order in his operations in Kentucky, his Federal opponents have borne ample and generous testimony. He seems to have known war and to have had a better idea of the exigencies and the requirements of the struggle than any other commander who fought for the South. From his writings and from some sketches and memoranda of campaigns left behind him, there can be no mistake made about the grasp of his intellect, nor of the further fact that such was his prescience and his logical acumen from the standpoint simply of the soldier that he predicted future events with a vividness and directness that the aftertime was to prove more than prophetic.

As far as it was fought by Johnston, Shiloh was the most perfect battle of the war and the most glorious for the arms and the prowess of the Southern Confederacy. When he fell the contrast came in, and from this contrast much may be understood how immeasurably he towered above those who succeeded him in the command of the Army of the Tennessee.

KATKOFF.

[Kansas City Times, April 1, 1887.]

If the report is true that M. Katkoff, editor of the Moscow Gazette, has fallen into deep disgrace with the Czar, then indeed has one stormy petrel been brought to the ground with ruffled plumage or broken wing.

In his journalistic make-up he was part Tartar and part Greek, that is to say: He rode like a Cossack and glided like a snake. His newspaper wore always two masks. Behind the first one could invaribly hear the rattling of chains and the swishing of the knout-that was for Russia. Behind the second one could always hear an air from an opera or the voice of a woman-that was for Europe. Remove both, and there was the elegant man of the world-smiling, plausible, soft of speech, a rose in his buttonhole and a love knot in his hair. It was as one going into a coffin to find a corpse and finding Adonis.

The Emperor Nicholas first discovered in the young Katkoff those elements of superb pliability and audacity which have made more tyrants and more revolutions than any other two elements which go to make up the sum of human character. Of course he had others, and shining ones, but these two constituted the pick-ax and spade with which he worked. The Emperor put him at Moscow, laying upon him only one injunction: "Be always a Muscovite," that is to say, stand always by the old Russian party as against the new.

And he has. Next to the Czar, himself, Katkoff had more to do with bringing on the Crimean War than any other man in Russia. He has said things which no other subject alive would ever have been permitted to say, and he has written and printed things which would have rewarded any other subject alive with Siberia. Whatever he has done, however, he has always wrote furiously, and ably as well, against Germany and Austria, and in favor of Russia's eternal advance, if it is only one foot a day, toward Constantinople. He has had a spy at every capital, and surprised, over and over again, the most important secrets of half the crowned heads in Europe. He was loved, petted, caressed and ennobled by the father of the present Czar, and for a time after Alexander II. met with so horrible a fate, Katkoff was in high favor with his successor. If he is now indeed in disgrace it is a mystery, but then, so many mysteries exist in Russia. The night of its despotism is sometimes impenetrable.

[August 7, 1887.]

So Katkoff, the great Russian editor, is dead. When death stripped him of his harness and flung it furiously aside in the lists where they had struggled month after month for the mastery, it rang out no louder than the blow of a wooden sword-blade upon a wooden buckler. A brief paragraph was all that was vouchsafed him in the American newspapers by way of obituary, and save in