acquaintance with him they were absolute. It was his habit in these more acquisitive years to turn every moment to account. Once in, reply to an inquiry as to his habits of reading he answered jocosely, "I read in the morning in bed as soon as it is light enough; then I read before breakfast and after breakfast; then after I get to the office, before lunch and a while after lunch, and, of course, before dinner. Then I read a while before I start to my office for the evening and after I have read my proofs and trudged home, before I go to bed and after I am in bed." And this was hardly an exaggeration. More amazing still, he remembered everything he read. He never ceased to possess anything he had once made his own, and before his thirty-fifth year he had made his own pretty much the whole range of the world's serious literature.
Mr. Scott's classical culture was so thorough and so sustained that much which the ordinary classicist gropes through painfully he could read without a lexicon. It was his daily practice and one of his chief diversions to turn passages from one language into another. "That's the trick," he would say, "which gave me such poor ability to write as I have. I could never have done anything without it." Most authors of classic renown he had read in the original, and all of what may be called the greater works of antiquity he knew practically by heart. The late Edward Failing,[1] himself a man of fine culture, once told me that his first meeting with Mr. Scott was in the reading room of the old Portland Library prior to his coming to The Oregonian. It was the practice of a group of studious young men to pass their evenings in the library and not infrequently conversation, with mutual comparison of their acquirements, was substituted for reading. Upon one such occasion somebody brought out a whimsical book in which as a literary curiosity Paradise Lost was rendered in its prose equivalent. As passage after passage of this fantastic production was read Mr. Scott gave the versified form from memory. The story is characteristic of Mr. Scott's
- ↑ Born in New York City Dec. 18, 1840; died Portland, Jan. 29, 1900. Came to Portland in 1853.
