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The Life And Letters Of John Hay V2 (1908)
The Life And Letters Of John Hay V2 - 1908 Author:John Hay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIX THE WASHINGTON CIRCLE THE reader cannot fail to have observed the quality of casualness in John Hay's life. Fitted to do many things extremely ... more »well, he pursued no one thing long, except the Lincoln history. Even while he was toiling on that, he appeared to be engaged on a side-issue rather than on what would have been, for almost any one else, the culmination of his life-work. Hay was not an amateur, but he managed to retain the freshness and ease, and the freedom from pedantic insistence, which make the charm of the amateur spirit. Real superiority is so rare that Americans will only grudgingly admit that a man may succeed in more than one field. The diplomat must not shine as a novelist or the historian win a separate fame as a dialect poet: the metropolitan editor must not be confounded with the author of a fascinating volume of sketches of travel. Hay discovered all these forbidden combinations; and as each achievement left him still unexhausted, he came to have the air of one who was waiting for an enterprise to which he could devote himself heart and soul. Perhaps it was this which led those who saw only thesurface to surmise, that, as he advanced far into middle life, he was by preference a man of the world, a dilettante, a delightful companion when the mood favored, but not really serious. No doubt, fortune helped to spread this misconception : because, after the death of Mr. Stone, who had always given the Hays a liberal allowance, Mrs. Hay's inheritance made them rich. Then it was that Hay and his friend Mr. Henry Adams built their houses side by side on Lafayette Square, employing as architect Henry H. Richardson, foremost in his profession, and one of the few American architects whose talent was so assured that he could borrow from the old masters ...« less