632 JOHN CODMAN ROPES. 



of which was furnished by Ropes in his volume entitled '• The Army 

 under Pope," being one of the volumes of Scribner's series on the Civil 

 War. Among other things it may be said of this book that it comjjletely 

 exonerates General Fitz John Porter from the charo^es brought aarainst 

 him after the second battle of Bull Run and npon which he was so 

 unjustly and cruelly condemned. I have been told that Ropes' weighty 

 presentation of the case exerted no small influence upon the final verdict 

 which declared General Porter innocent and went as far as possible 

 toward repairing the grievous wrong that had been done. If no other 

 result had come from founding the Military Historical Society, this alone 

 would have more than justified its existence. 



But Ropes' magnum opus, " The Story of the Civil War," was unfor- 

 tunately never completed. It would have filled four volumes, and death 

 removed the author soon after the publication of the second. The loss is 

 one that can never be made good. Other writers of course may go over 

 the period which Ropes failed to cover, but nobody can complete his 

 book, for it is a case in which the writer's individual characteristics and 

 personal experience are the all-important features. We have heard 

 much in recent years of the advantages of the co-operative method in 

 writing history, whereby a hundred experts may take each a small frag- 

 ment of the ground to be covered. The merits of such a method are not 

 denied, but it has one great defect : it gives us Hamlet with the Prince 

 of Denmark left out. In an historical narrative nothing can make up for 

 the personality of the narrator. A hundred experts on the Civil War 

 would not fill Ropes' place for the simple reason that their hundred 

 individual experiences cannot be combined in the same stream of con- 

 sciousness. Ropes had gathered experience from every quarter ; he had 

 not only read pretty much everything worth reading on his subject, he 

 had not only delved with endless patience in the original documents, but 

 he had obtained through social intercourse with soldiers now passed away 

 a truly enormous fund of information, a great part of which has surely 

 perished with him. I remember that during the last two or three years 

 tlie thoufjht sometimes occurred to him that he might not live to finish 

 his book. He told me one day that he only lacked eight years of being 

 three score and ten, and that eight years were all too short a period for 

 finishing the two volumes that remained to be done ; he must therefore 

 ''scorn delight and live laborious daj's." He was always extremely fond 

 of society ; no man more keenly enjoyed a dinner-party or an evening at 

 tlie club, and I can testify that sometimes after club hours were over we 

 used to enjoy prolonging our friendly chat (juite into the morning hours ; 



