Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/19

 who then saw his grief from without will not adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him. It drove him to arduous labors, which the years made a habit of life. Save a single volume of his father's intimate friendship with Emerson, he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm, and weight.

In his research he was to the end a firm believer in the study of the plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were written did not interest him. For 'weak endings,' 'incomplete lines,' and all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed disregard. It was not for him. He would have questioned his personal identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere's plays.

The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made accurate study possible to the