John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[487] greatly interested in observing the extreme refinement and elegance of the repast. No literary man or artist of the most cultivated taste could desire anything more delicate or artistic. Not one of the other distinguished men about whom I am now writing approached him in this kind of refinement, or in the culture which it suggested, except perhaps it may have been General Webb.

Mr. Bennett had an ample body of enemies, and received in his day more personal abuse than any other member of the profession. Much of it was undoubtedly provoked by his unbridled manner of speaking about many things which most people held sacred. During the first years of the Herald the Catholic religion was the special object of his witty flings, and I cannot recollect in all literature anything more blasphemous and shocking than the expressions he frequently used. It often seemed as if he were running amuck against the established ideas and usages of society, yet it was all done with such an affluence of wit, such surprising illustrations, and such a store of historical references that even those who were shocked by the wickedness were entertained by the manner of it; and thus the indifferent general public bought the Herald, and stood by its editor with a sort of indifferent sympathy which contributed to the steady increase of its popularity and power. Its success was entirely the work of Mr. Bennett; and, with all the rest, he had an entire appreciation of the supreme importance of news, and went after it with as much force and elasticity as he went after everything else. He ran expresses in opposition to Mr. Beach, though he finally joined the combination and became a member of the Associated Press, with Beach, Greeley, Webb, and Brooks, for all of whom he maintained a kind of intellectual contempt, but none of whom he really hated half so much as he pretended.

There was one quality of Mr. Bennett's which is worthy of unqualified admiration, and that is his spirit of independence. This he maintained under every stress and difficulty. No man but he controlled the Herald; no mind but his inspired it. There were all sorts of stories about blackmail and