What was, and might have been
regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and
made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont
to meet and know much of him.
The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity,
prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland
"absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described himself
as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" of
course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head
of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice,
for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty
years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.
Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his familiars,
not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell
occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he once said, "if you
owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit
it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you ought
to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about the size of it."
"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would send
for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and
put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose
myself in the wilds of Africa.
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