Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/546

HENBY WATTEBSON 523 but it would be a great mistake to leave the impression that he was only a politician. His social and literary abilities were known and appreciated as widely as his political work. Sham, dishonesty, and inmiorality drew his severest criticism. His critical arrows were tipped with fire but never dipped in poison. As an orator Mr. Watterson has been in demand for the last quarter of a century. No man on the American platform to-day excels him. When the Columbian Exposition was ded- icated, he appeared with Chauncey Depew as the official spokesman of the government. His lectures on ^^ Money and Morals and ^^ Abraham Lincoln" have been delivered in al- most every city in the United States. Among his writings may be noted Oddities of Southern Life and Character^ a vol- ume of humor, The Spanish American War^ written as the war prog^ssed, and the Compromises of Lt/e, a compilation of his lectures. He has for many years been engaged on a Life of Lincoln. This will no doubt be his masterpiece in the literary field. No one is better prepared to interpret Lincoln than Watterson. Li 1865, Mr. Watterson married the daughter of the Hon- orable Andrew Ewing. They had five children. At his coun- try home, Mansfield, twelve miles south of Louisville, he is enjoying life in the good old Southern style. His summers are usually spent in Switzerland, his winters in Florida. Thoughtless writers like to talk glibly of the witticisms, terse expressions, sparkling editorials, and heated denuncia- tions of Mr. Watterson, as if those were the chief character- istics of his life work. Such writers have tried to make of Lincoln a wag and a practical joker. No man has had a clearer vision of a united, moral, glorious republic, than Mr. Watterson. And few men have striven more faithfully through as long a period to realize these ideals. Around this central vision the struggles of his long, unselfish life can be harmonized. As an editor he used the Courier-Journal for this purpose. He is the last of his type of editors. He no more resembles the modem editor than a Methodist circuit rider resembles a Wall Street financier. He would and did