propensity to work in season and out of season—these qualities, supplemented by broad resources of knowledge and the powers of a mind which instinctively rejected non-essentials to seize upon the essence of things—these make up a professional character which in my judgment has not been matched in the journalism of this country or any other. And when I reflect that Mr. Scott passed almost half a century with nothing of the stimulus which comes from intellectual rivalry, with few of the legitimate helps of intellectual association, unspurred by any species of competition, working wholly under the promptings of his own impulses and his own fine sense of manly obligation, I marvel at the record.
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Generations of clean-blooded, wholesome-living, right-minded forbears gave Mr. Scott a towering frame and a constitution of mighty vitality. A youth of manual labor and untouched by vices had toughened every fibre of the physical man. Never was there a sounder mind in a sounder body. He had an eye which could gaze unshrinking into the face of the sun at meridian and which no stress of study ever wearied. "I have never been conscious of having any eyes," he once remarked when after many hours of severe work he was cautioned to be careful of his vision. Labors which would exhaust the vitality of an ordinary man he could in the early and middle years of his life sustain day after day with no sense of fatigue. At one period—about the year 1875, as I recall it—he devoted no less than eighteen hours per day to his studies and his office duties. He was temperamentally disposed to industry and he had never cultivated habits which idly dissipate time. Many men of fine minds are subject to atmospheres and dependent for their moods upon surroundings. Something of this disability, if it may be so called, came to Mr. Scott in his later years, but during the greater part of his life he cared nothing at all about these matters. He could have sat amid the clamor of a boiler factory and pursued undisturbed the most abstruse studies. In later years his powers of abstraction declined, but in the first twenty years of my
