numerous publications and the evidence of his learned colleagues. As a writer of graceful verse he had come into notice through the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger, and now his forceful prose gained him added reputation, while his forensic ability and his wit made him a welcome guest in every gathering.

During the period of his greatest literary activity McCabe published the works mentioned in the bibliography appended hereto.

Among his addresses may be mentioned: "Virginia's Schools before and after the Revolution," delivered at the University of Virginia in 1888; his address before the New England Society of New York in 1899, which attracted the editorial comment of the leading newspapers in the country; "John R. Thompson," an eloquent address on the occasion of the presentation of the portrait of the Virginia poet to the University of Virginia in 1899; and his speech at the University of Virginia in 1905, when the late Professor Thomas R. Price's library was presented to that institution. Articles by him have appeared in Harper's Monthly, The Century, etc., while in England The Academy, the Saturday Review and other of the foremost English monthly and weekly publications have accepted his work. After the death of Tennyson, Captain McCabe published in The Century of March, 1902, a very striking article entitled "Personal Recollections of Alfred, Lord Tennyson," which was received with great interest throughout the English speaking world, for the author's long intimacy with the poet-laureate enabled him to speak with authority.

In recognition of his scholarship and literary achievements, Captain McCabe has had conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts by the College of William and Mary and by Williams College in Massachusetts, that of Doctor of Letters by Yale in 1897, and that of Doctor of Laws by the college of William and Mary in 1906. He is a member of Alpha Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a member of the Order of the Cincinnati, and of many other distinguished clubs and societies both in this country and in England.

Dr. McCabe has a unique private library, rich in autograph presentation copies from Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, and many other men of note. One of his most highly prized possessions is a first edition copy of 'Henry Esmond,' bearing on the flyleaf the inscription "For my dearest mother and children, W.M.T." This book was given by Mrs. Anne Thackeray Richie to John R. Thompson after her father's death, and when Thompson died, in 1873, was left by the poet to his friend McCabe.

Dr. McCabe combines a varied learning with the keen perceptions of a great wit, the brimming zest and high spirits of a joker, and the genial nature of a man of the world-qualities that have gained him

the esteem of savants and soldiers, of poets and philosophers, on both sides of the Atlantic. His earnest, helpful efforts in the broadest humanitarian undertakings have gone far outside the conventional limits of his calling, making him widely known as a public man. Thus he conspicuously served his Alma Mater, the University of Virginia, after her partial destruction by fire, for he was one of that board of visitors through whose energy she was fully refurnished in material equipment.

In addition to his eloquent and witty prose, McCabe has produced verse that deserves a place in the American anthology. Its body is slender, nor is its range broad; but within his limitations he has produced poetry that is felicitous in diction, skilful in metrical structure, possessed of feeling in the lyric vein and fire in the heroic.

Dr. McCabe, still in the enjoyment of robust health, is pursuing a busy life of public service and civic virtue, although he long ago gave up active work in his chosen profession of a teacher.

Robert Armistead Stewart

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Defense of Petersburg, 1864-1865. Translated into German. by Baron Mannsberg of the Prussian Artillery of the Guard. Richmond, 1876.

Ballads of Battle and Bravery, an Anthology of Heroic Verse. New York, Harper Brothers, 1873.

Aids to Latin Orthography. Translated from the German of Wilhelm Brambach, and revised by the translator. Harper Brothers, 1872.

A new edition of Bingham's Latin Grammar. (Partly re-written and greatly augmented.) Philadelphia, Butler and Company, 1883. A Revised Edition of Bingham's Latin Reader. Philadelphia, Butler and Company, 1886.

A Revised edition of Bingham's Cæsar. Philadelphia, Butler and Company, 1886.

FIRST MEETING AND LAST PARTING

From "Personal Recollections of Alfred, Lord Tennyson," published in the Century Magazine, March, 1902.

MORE than sixteen years ago it was that, at the instance of a dear old friend of mine in England, who was also a close friend of the Tennysons, I received an invitation to Aldworth, the poet's country-seat on the border-line of Surrey and Sussex.

It is always somewhat trying to a shy man to go into a country house where all the people are strangers to him, and my shyness was not diminished in the present instance by recalling more than one story of Tennyson's brusquerie to visitors. Still, my experience of English hospitality had been for many years so uniformly charming that I had no very serious misgivings.

The elder D'Israeli tells us, in his "Curiosities of Literature," that "Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of Genius," and there are not a few of us who sadly admit this dictum to be true.

But it was not so in the case of Tennyson-at least, after he had passed middle age. As we all know, he was one of a family of twelve children, the son of a country parson, whose living at Somersby in Lincolnshire brought him in but the slender stipend of two hundred pounds a year. But though inheriting virtually nothing, and living for years the ideal life of the poet, in tranquil seclusion, "far from the madding crowd," sedulously devoted to his art, minutely correcting, revising, polishing, as is the wont of true genius, that does not disdain "long days of labor and nights devoid of ease"-publishing only at long intervals until the days when he had become famous-he yet achieved a substantial fortune, and when he accepted a peerage in his old age, was able to support in becoming fashion the adventitious dignity of his rank.

About 1867 the poet purchased some thirty or forty acres of land near Haslemere in Surrey, and determined to build there-in part to escape, as he said, the London cockneys, who swarmed over his lawn at Freshwater in summer, but chiefly because the air of the Surrey hills, tonic with its scent of heather, was peculiarly invigorating to his wife, who for many years had been an invalid, and whom, as did his own "Geraint"

in the case of "fair Enid," he always "compassed with sweet observances."

His friend James Knowles, long editor of The Nineteenth Century, was his architect. The place he called Aldworth, and there, for the last twenty years or more of his life, he lived for the greater part of the year, still keeping up Farringford, his place in the Isle of Wight, whither he went to reside soon after he was created Laureate in 1850.

Aldworth, one of the loveliest homes in a land of lovely homes, is situated on the lofty range of Surrey hills known as "Blackdown." It lies perched on a steep incline, high up on the mountain-side, much of the level space on which it stands having been wrested from nature by enormous labor. Behind it to the northwest rise sheer the lonely downs, covered with bracken and gorse, shutting out the bleak winds of winter, while to the south the Sussex wealds and Kentish hop-fields, dappled with light and shade, lie spread out in smiling beauty at one's feet.

From the stately south terrace, with its ivy-covered stone balustrade and its huge vases filled with flaming roses, one may look clean away for full sixty miles-the bold chalky outlines of Leith Hill gleaming white in the distance to the left, in the foreground the dreaming spires of Petworth soaring aloft amid clustering English elms, while, far beyond, above the wooded copses of Arundel Castle, home of the Howards, dukes of Norfolk, one may catch the shimmer of that "silver sea" which Shakspere sung as fitting setting to the "tiny motherisle."

One, standing there, could but remember instantly his own. description of the view he loved so well, in the lines addressed to Sir Edward Hamley:

You came and looked and loved the view,

Long known and loved by me,

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea.

On a clear day, indeed, one may catch a glimpse of Fairlight, overlooking Hastings, and mark the very spot where Norman William landed with his bold barons, a D'Eyncourt in his train, to wrest the land from the Saxon.

Short of sight as was the old poet, he apparently knew every foot of the historic landscape, and once, as we stood together, looking southward from the great library windows, when I thoughtlessly asked him of some place in the direction of Pevensey, he answered promptly, "Oh, that-nothing special there now, but there lay once the Silva Anderida' of Tacitus."

Without, Aldworth is fair indeed to look upon, with its old-fashioned pleasaunces and rose-garden, where the poet, with his passionate love of flowers, always delighted to wander, its dense coppices and wide expanses of velvet turf, such as one sees nowhere outside of England.

Within, it is the ideal home of the wealthy man of letters, with its busts and portraits and paintings. Everywhere there are books, and over the chimneypieces in the stately rooms are emblazoned the arms of the Tennysons d'Eyncourt; for, though the Laureate sung in "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" that The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent,

he was yet possessed of that proper pride in being sprung of an ancient and honorable race common to every man of gentle birth. The note of genuine English comfort is everywhere dominant, while to a man of culture it is a veritable "Palace of Art." Such was the English home at the doors of which I alighted on that August day more than sixteen years ago.

The poet had not returned from his long daily tramp over the downs, but I was shown in at once to Lady Tennyson, who received me with such charming cordiality that within a few minutes I was chatting away as gaily to her, as she lay on her lounge, as to some old gentlewoman in Virginia who had known my mother and all my "people." In a few moments, in stalked the poet, just returned from his walk, and gave me grave and courteous welcome.

I need hardly describe to my readers that face and figure so familiar to them from photographs. (I may say here, in passing, that, to my mind, the best of these photographs is that by Barraud, though the poet himself and his wife and son preferred the one by Mayall, a copy of which he kindly volunteered to give me after I came to know him well.) He was