could always return; and it is interesting to note that the last book that he took up the night before his death was “Dmitri Roudine.”
His sympathy and appreciation of life, people, and books, instead of deadening, seemed, indeed, to have grown more acute as old age lifted him into a region where he saw the facts of human existence with unimpaired vision. Never a profuse talker, except when heated in argument, to his intimates he showed a distinction of mind, revealing a most original, vigorous, and interesting personality, which gave value to his least word, seeming to meet the most familiar things with a freshness of vision which offered a new point of view. Few men excelled him in wit, and his good things dropped from him like the ripe, dry fruit of a long experience.
If not without some intimations of growing weakness, he had, nevertheless, almost up to the moment of his painless death, lost none of his faculties and powers.
During his editorship of this Magazine a large amount of critical and other work from Mr. Kirk’s hand appeared in its pages—keen and wise comment on American and foreign politics, reviews of notable books, historical and literary. A paper on Madame de Staël, which he had several times given as a lecture and which was a result of intimate study of French literature and memoirs, as well as a vivid and sympathetic rendering of a personality, was published in January, 1881. “Some Recollections of Thackeray,” which were tucked modestly into “Our Monthly Gossip” of January, 1871, were reprinted by Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard in his “Anecdote Biographies of Dickens and Thackeray.” The Lippincott notice of Carlyle’s death (April, 1881) was a personal article and was followed later by reviews of the “Reminiscences” and of Froude’s “Carlyle.” Other recollections of London in 1850 entered into a notice of Rossetti’s first volume in September, 1870, and into a paper called “A Slender Sheaf of Memories” in the Lippincott of November, 1902. Two papers on “Shakespeare’s Tragedies on the Stage,” in this Magazine for May and June, 1884, embodied recollections of Macready, the elder Booth, and other actors, besides drawing on the fund of Shakespearian knowledge and thought which furnished various reviews of books on Shakespeare, as well as the vivid article on “Macbeth” printed in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1895. “Reform on Two Stools,” an article on the Grant and Greeley campaign, published anonymously in Lippincott’s for September, 1872, attracted considerable attention at the time, and is not wholly inapplicable to later campaigns. At the time of his death Mr. Kirk was engaged in the preparation of a paper on “Words,” which will appear in this Magazine.
