coming literary editor, succeeding in that post Charles DeKay on his appointment by President Cleveland as Consul-General to Berlin. When The New York Times Saturday Book Review was established in 1896, Halsey was appointed its editor, and conducted it on such a broad-minded plan that it made rapid advancement as a power in American literary life. Assiduous labor and painstaking care placed the Saturday Book Review on so high a plane that it soon became the mentor and guide of millions of readers, but in 1902 its editor resigned his post to become literary adviser to D. Appleton & Company. On the termination of this contract, he joined the staff of the Funk & Wagnalls Company in a similar capacity, and continued in this connection until his death. With the passing of Francis W. Halsey a highly valued member of the editorial staff of The Literary Digest entered into rest. Well known both as author and editor, his literary work was supplemented by wider activities in the publishing enterprises of the Company of which he was literary adviser for many years. Mr. Halsey was the author of a number of books chief among which may be mentioned his "An Old New York Frontier; Its Indian Wars, Pioneers, and Land Titles," which was an account of the early history of the head waters of the Susquehanna from Otsego Lake to the Pennsylvania line (1901). In 1878 he published "Two Months Abroad," and in 1895 he wrote an elaborate introduction for a volume of family history entitled "Thomas Halsey of Hertfordshire, England and Southampton, L. I." Other works from his pen were "Our Literary Deluge"; "The Pioneers of Unadilla Village"; an historical and biographical introduction to Mrs. Rowson's "Charlotte Temple"; an introduction to Richard Smith's "Tour of Four Great Rivers." In 1900 he wrote a memoir of his wife, "Virginia Isabel Forbes," to whom he was married in 1883, and who died in January, 1899. As an editor, Mr. Halsey produced "American Authors and Their Homes"; "Authors of Our Day in Their Homes"; "Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes"; "Of the Making of a Book"; "Great Epochs of American History Mr. Halsey's formative influence, his ability to steer clear of alluring sensationalism and precocity, pedantry, and staleness; his frankness and modesty, all served to establish him in the community long before his death as a man of sound literary judgment with a gift of being wholesome without being prudish, and well-read without being a prig-a man who loved his fellow men, one by nature temperate and generous, honest and faithful, who added to these attributes, wit, culture, and scholarship of that highest order which may be fittingly characterized as practical. Of him and of the present work, George Douglas said in The San Francisco Bulletin:-"Twenty years from now Mr. Halsey's work will stand with no more needed than the addition of some necessary foot-notes as more and more of the truth is divulged. The main thing is to get intelligently interested in the war, interested in something more than its butchery tho that should be ever present in the mind. People who forget its horrors are apt to become as warped in their judgment as those who seem to have eliminated all consciousness of the fact that there was a war in which millions of men lost their lives, and who can not see that there will be other wars in the future unless something be done to prevent them when the horrors of the great struggle that has just passed are still fresh in the mind. Not a question concerning the war but is dealt with in these pages, and upon all there is the fullest information. Halsey writes as an American and an ally. He is fair, very fair, in dealing with the enemy; but he is just, as he understands justice. Yet he is not one of those historians who write for the purpose of maintaining national animosities." To him it was a God-given privilege to live in those stirring times when men fought against the lust of dominion to vindicate the rights of small nations against the arrogant and overbearing might of perfidious powers; for, he had the faith of one who could look with fearless eyes beyond the tragedy of a world at war, and he gloried in the fact that he had lived to see the powers of Darkness put to flight and the Morning of a greater Freedom break. F. H. V. |