SAMUEL DICKSON. XV 



" As you came in contact with liim you felt that atmosphere — I hardly 

 know how to describe it. It was more like the fabled breeze that did not 

 come from the haunts of men. Tennyson, you remember, described the wind 

 that blows all day in a land ' where no man is or hath been since the making 

 of the world.' That expresses my thought somewhat of something which is 

 entirely apart or free from any stain or taint of other things or of person- 

 ality. Farther even would he go than those of us who were with him could 

 go, and never once did he falter in the integrity, clearness and the forcibleness 

 of his conclusions." 



Hon. John Bassett Moore said of him: 



" Always abreast of the times, eagerly noting the latest development's in 

 science, in industry and in oolitics, it may be said that he made almost daily 

 excursions into the fields of history and literature. He did not, indeed, figure 

 in the category of omnivorous readers, who devour voraciously whatever 

 falls in their way, good and bad. His mind was too delicatety and sensi- 

 tively organized for such a feat. He was singularly discriminating. The 

 worthless he instinctively rejected, but there was little of real and permanent 

 value that escaped him. As a result it was always a delight to talk with him, 

 and his interlocutor never went away emptyhanded. On the contrary, although 

 he might feel a sense of hunger rather than of satiety, he could at any rate 

 affirm in the felicitous phrase of Dryden, that he had ' not wanted sweet dis- 

 course, the banquet of the mind.' " 



Mr. J. Levering Jones, one of Mr. Dickson's colleagues in the 

 board of trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, said of him: 



"There was a delicate austerity in his sense of honor. Deviation from 

 intellectual or legal rectitude was intolerable to him. Upon a question where 

 either was involved, he made no argument. He would simply make a gesture 

 and render a decision. . . . He possessed a native dignity of manner, but 

 mingled with it an unaffected modesty. This gave him the fortunate faculty, 

 in the discussion of moral questions, of separating himself from the subject 

 under consideration. What he said, therefore, became charged with an 

 unusual and invincible force. He rested, in such observations, upon simple 

 and eternal principles. He conveyed no idea of personal relation to them. 

 As a declarant or analyst he was only dealing with ethical and spiritual 

 matters." 



Mr. C. Stuart Patterson said of him : 



" He was a man of strong convictions, and he never was lacking in the 

 courage needed for their expression, and yet he was exceptionally broad- 

 minded and tolerant of differences of opinion, and he could always see and 

 do full justice to the merits of the opposing view. He was by temperament 

 conservative; yet, even in his later years, his conservatism was not the unrea- 

 soning conservatism of old age, but it was an intelligent conservatism based 

 upon an accurate knowledge of existing conditions, and a just estimate of the 

 probable results of proposed innovations. In social intercourse Mr. Dickson 



