Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/396

 These six items are what have been given to the public separately, outside of the Oregonian columns. It is a bibliography singularly unexciting to represent the published works of a man who in his day was the most popular writer in the Pacific Northwest. With the further restriction of one subscription and two limited editions, he has indeed lacked a fair plebiscite of post mortem appreciation. The ever fresh quality of his style and such perennial refreshment as may be in his subject matter, have had a confined existence in the books that have been mentioned and in the heavy bound volumes of the Oregonian in a few library stack rooms. He who in his lifetime enjoyed facilities beyond those belonging to anyone else for reaching a contemporary public, has had no chance fully to reach a later public and be appraised by it. Thus, as was remarked, a newspaper affords a poor liaison with posterity.

Renown while he lived was his by the grace of ability and hard work. Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor and Harvey W. Scott were two who kept on working, the former though unrewarded, the latter long after he had been given enough and could have stopped. On account of his unwearying labors, other toilers would withhold from him as undeserved no gain, including, if it should come, immortality. This he greatly wanted and, from signs in the biographies and eulogies, rather expected.

As a man he was lacking in sympathy and humanity and as a leader he held to outworn social theories. In some ways he was overestimated, his scholarship, for instance, being credited with too great a breadth and profundity. The manifestations of this, however, were