An intimate acquaintance with a distant relative of the editor of the Tribune puts it in my power to furnish the public with the last—positively the very last—link necessary to perfect the chain of knowledge already in its possession concerning Mr. Greeley: I mean his private habits. We know all about him as regards every other department of his life and services. Because, whenever a magazinist or a bookmaker is employed to write, and cannot think of a subject, he writes about Horace Greeley. Even the boys in the schools have quit building inspired “compositions” on “The Horse,” and have gone to doing Horace Greeley instead; and when declamation-day comes around, their voices are no longer “still for war” and Patrick Henry, but for peace and Horace Greeley. Now, the natural result of all this is that the public have come at last to think that this man has no life but public life, no nature but a public nature, no habits but public habits. This is all wrong. Mr. Greeley has a private life. Mr. Greeley has private habits.
Mr. Greeley gets up at three o’clock in the morning; for it is one of his favorite maxims that only early rising can keep the health unimpaired and the brain vigorous. He then wakes up all the household and assembles them in the library, by candle-light: and, after quoting the beautiful lines,
“Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,”
he appoints each individual’s task for the day, sets him at it with encouraging words, and goes back to bed again. I mention here, in no fault-finding spirit, but with the deference justly due a man who is older and wiser and worthier than I, that he snores awfully. In a moment of irritation, once, I was rash enough to say I never would sleep with him until he broke himself of this unfortunate habit. I have kept my word with bigoted and unwavering determination.
At half-past eleven o’clock Mr. Greeley rises again. He shaves himself. He considers that there is great virtue and economy in shaving himself. He does it with a dull razor, sometimes humming a part of a tune (he knows part of a tune, and takes an innocent delight in regarding it as the first half of Old Hundred; but parties familiar with that hymn have felt obliged to confess that they could not recognize it, and, therefore, the noise he makes is doubtless an unconscious original composition of Mr. Greeley’s), and sometimes, when the razor is especially dull, he accompanies himself with a formula like this: “Damn the damned razor, and the damned outcast who made it.”—H. G.
He then goes out into his model garden, and applies his vast store of agricultural knowledge to the amelioration of his cabbages; after which he writes an able agricultural article for the instruction of American farmers, his soul cheered the while with the reflection that if cabbages were worth eleven dollars apiece his model farm would pay.
He next goes to breakfast, which is a frugal, abstemious meal with him, and consists of nothing but just such things as the market affords, nothing more. He drinks nothing but water—nothing whatever but water and coffee, and tea, and Scotch ale, and lager beer, and lemonade with a fly in it—sometimes a house fly, and sometimes a horse fly, according to the amount of inspiration required to warm him up to his daily duties. During breakfast he reads the Tribune all through, and enjoys the satisfaction of knowing that all the brilliant things in it, written by Young and Cooke, and Hazard, and myself, are attributed to him by a confiding and infernal public.
After breakfast he writes a short editorial, and puts a large dash at the beginning of it, thus (——), which is the same as if he put H. G. after it, and takes a savage pleasure in reflecting that none of us understrappers can use that dash, except in profane conversation when chaffing over the outrage. He writes this editorial in his own handwriting. He does it because he is so vain of his penmanship. He always did take an inordinate pride in his penmanship. He hired out once, in his young days, as a writing master, but the enterprise failed. The pupils could not translate his marks with any certainty. His first copy was “Virtue is its own reward,” and they got it “Washing with soap is wholly absurd,” and so the trustees discharged him for attempting to convey bad morals, through the medium of worse penmanship. But, as I was saying, he writes his morning editorial. Then he tries to read it over, and can’t do it, and so sends it to the printers, and they try to read it, and can’t do it; and so they set it up at random as you may say, putting in what words they can make out, and when they get aground on a long word they put in “reconstruction” or “universal suffrage,” and spar off and paddle ahead, and next morning, if the degraded public can tell what it is all about, they say H. G. wrote it, and if they can’t, they say it is one of those imbecile understrappers, and that is the end of it.
On Sundays Mr. Greeley sits in a prominent pew in Mr. Chapin’s church and lets on that he is asleep, and the congregation regard it as an eccentricity of genius.
When he is going to appear in public, Mr. Greeley spends two hours on his toilet. He is the most painstaking and elaborate man about getting up his dress that lives in America. This is his chiefest and his pleasantest foible. He puts on his old white overcoat and turns up the collar. He puts on a soiled shirt, saved from the wash, and leaves one end of the collar unbuttoned. He puts on his most dilapidated hat, turns it wrong side before, cants it onto the back of his head, and jams an extra dent in the side of it. He puts on his most atrocious boots, and spends fifteen minutes tucking the left leg of his pants into his boot-top in what shall seem the most careless and unstudied way. But his cravat—it is into the arrangement of his cravat that he throws all his soul, all the powers of his great mind. After fixing at it for forty minutes before the glass it is perfect—it is askew in every way—it overflows his coat-collar on one side and sinks into oblivion on the other—it climbs and it delves around about his neck—the knot is conspicuously displayed under his left ear, and it stretches one of its long ends straight out horizontally, and the other goes after his eye, in the good old Toodles fashion—and then, completely and marvelously appareled, Mr. Greeley strides forth, rolling like a sailor, a miracle of astounding costumery, the awe and wonder of the nations!
But I haven’t time to tell the rest of his private habits. Suffice it that he is an upright and an honest man—a practical, great-brained man—a useful man to his nation and his generation—a famous man who has justly earned his celebrity—and withal the worst-dressed man in this or any other country, even though he does take so thundering much pains and put on so many frills about it.
November 7, 1868