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ROBERT ARMISTEAD STEWART

MONG that group of men and women of letters who have brought distinction to Richmond, Virginia, as the center of literary activity, William Gordon McCabe occupies a prominent place. He was born in Richmond, August 4, 1841. His father, the son of a distinguished officer of the Revolution, was a clergyman, noted not only in his profession, but also as an authority on Colonial history and as a poet of no mean talent. The Rev. Doctor McCabe's wife was Sophia Gordon Taylor, a great-granddaughter of George Taylor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and on her mother's side descended from the Gordons of Earlston, Scotland.

The first ten years of young McCabe's life were passed in the ancient town of Smithfield, while his father was rector of the Episcopal church there; the next six he spent at Hampton. After a preparatory course, in which he distinguished himself above his fellows, and after serving a short apprenticeship as tutor, he entered the University of Virginia, in 1860. But his stay here was destined to be short, for the secession of Virginia was the signal for him, along with many of his fellow students, to hasten to the front in a student corps known as the "Southern Guards." He entered the army as a private, but because of his conspicuous prowess and devotion he was promoted through the various grades till the end of the war found him a captain of artillery. His career embraced the Peninsular Campaign, Chancellorsville, service at Charleston, with the gallant Pegram's artillery in the great battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, and, after Appomattox, he joined General Johnston in North Carolina in the vain hope of renewing the struggle.

In October, 1865, Captain McCabe founded in Petersburg, Virginia, the University School, with so vast an influence in shaping the character and ideals of the young gentry of Virginia as not inaptly to be compared to Rugby in its prime. For twenty-six years he labored in this chosen field, and found his reward in a noble body of highspirited, well-grounded youth who went from out his walls to win. distinction in all walks of life. During this period of teaching McCabe had been active in many other ways. His fame as a Latinist was based on his profound studies in that language, as attested by his

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”