Page:Letter of Maria White (Mrs. James Russell) Lowell to Sophia (Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne; with remarks by F. B. Sanborn.djvu/17

 The complicated wrongs and woes disclosed in the following letter from William Black to Osgood (the Boston publisher and companion of Dickens in London, where he had a branch office), can hardly be unraveled in one short page.

Black himself was a man of Celtic genius, who wrote things good and bad,—but apt to be good reading. He was publishing a novel in Harper's Magazine between my two visits to Greece, in 1890-93; and he took his modern Greek heroine to Athens, where, if I remember rightly, he hid her from observation in the Queen Amelia Orphanage for Girls, which the late Michael Anagnos took me to see in 1890. I recognized the place from Black's description, for he had the art—which Cherbuliez had in his Cheval de Phidias, and which Richard Harding Davis had not—of so describing the atmosphere and locations of Athens, that the visitor might traverse the small city by his faithful pages. [ 9 ]