Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/154



H. W. Scott's intellectual interests were extremely varied. His wide reading and habit of deep thought were shown most, of course, in his editorials, which touched on every theme and were always illuminative; but his conversation also betrayed an almost exhaustless knowledge of books, and constant meditation upon their contents. Throughout the course of his long life he was a persistent reader and collector of books. Like most men of mark, he began to form his library in early life, at a time when every volume represented more or less sacrifice. It is from the books which are thus purchased by a young man more perhaps than from the acquisitions of later years, that his genuine literary predispositions may be ascertained. When he has attained to fortune and wide acquaintance with public characters, a man buys books because they are making a noise in the world, or because the author has a great scientific reputation or for a thousand other reasons but in his struggling youth he buys them only because he wishes to read them. Some of Mr. Scott's earliest acquisitions were histories and volumes of the classics.

His preference for these branches of literature never diminished. The catalogue of his library shows that he came into possession sooner or later of almost every important historical work that has ever been written, not the narrow technical essays certainly, but the productions of wide international interest. He read Greek with the ordinary collegiate skill and Latin with much facility so that the great classical historians