Macmillan's Magazine

“ Excepting in the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by Success Magazine, I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the Delineator gave me a first prize of $2,000 for a short story, The Ancient Dawn. In 1904 I began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. ”

“ Macmillan have, in their Golden Treasury Series especially, provided editions of standard works, volumes of selected poetry, and original compositions, which entitle this series to be called classical. Nothing can be better than the literary execution, nothing more elegant than the material workmanship."—British Quarterly Review. ”

“ Daniel Macmillan, founder and head of the distinguished publishing house of Macmillan & Co., was a man of mark, of strong character, rare business talents, a man of ideas, a deeply religious man, who yet got free of the trammels of theology, and a life-long victim of pulmonary disease, which ended his life at the age of forty-four. ”

“ At the end of 1843, with the help of a loan from the Hares, Macmillan was able to take over Newby's business in Trinity Street, Cambridge, 'just opposite the Senate House.' The first Cambridge catalogue of Macmillan & Co. (the 'Co.' being represented by Daniel's brother Alexander, who for the present kept up the shop in Aldersgate Street, though this was relinquished before the end of the year) was issued in March 1844. The conjuncture was a happy one for a man of Macmillan's energies and special rifts. No man who oversold books for a livelihood was more conscious of a vocation. ”

“ As a result of Sir William Dawson's constant anxieties and strenuous labours, his health had been for some time in a precarious state. In his annual University Lecture ten years before, he had said, “My connection with this University for the past twenty-eight years has been fraught with that happiness which results from the consciousness of effort in a worthy cause, and from association with such noble and self-sacrificing men as those who have built up McGill College. ”

“ Devoted to the Highlands and its people, Macmillan was the first chief of the Clan Macmillan Society (1892-9) . He was a diligent student of art, and one of his last literary undertakings was a monograph on George Frederick Watts, R.A. ('Temple Biographies' series) , posthumously published in 1903.
He died at his residence in Edinburgh on 24 May 1903, and was buried in the Dean cemetery. He married on 14 June 1859 Jane, second daughter of William Patison of Williamfield, near Edinburgh. She survived him with one son and five daughters. ”

“ The great opulence of Cambridge and Oxford is far beyond our reach, and although I should be sorry ever to see them lose a shilling, for I think them wisely adapted to so rich and populous and learned a country as England, I consider them unfit for this country. ”

“ MACMILLAN, HUGH (1833–1903) , presbyterian divine and religious writer, born at Aberfeldy on 17 Sept. 1833, was eldest son in the family of six sons and three daughters of Alexander Macmillan, merchant of Aberfeldy, by his wife Margaret Macfarlane. After attending a school in his native place and Hill Street Academy, Edinburgh, he entered the university of Edinburgh, where he went through the arts course and also studied medicine. ”

“ Macmillan combines the eye of a poet and the knowledge of a savant with the heart of a saint; while he analyses the phenomena of nature on purely scientific principles, he interprets them on the principles of a devout Christian theist. He sees in nature the wonderful ways of Him who made it; 'looks through nature up to nature's God,' and often, in virtue of his religious insight, invests familiar things with unobserved and beautiful significance. Beneath the surface of natural symbolism he discerns the religious and loving ways of a divine Creator and father ”

“ Men of the Time, 1899; Who's Who; Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, by Sir Leslie Stephen, 1895; Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan, by Charles L. Graves, 1910; Letters of Alexander Macmillan, edited by his son, George A. Macmillan, and printed for private circulation, 1908; private sources. ”

“ A weaker nature would have exhausted itself in the problems of administration.
“He, himself, has left it on record, in his paper entitled, 'Thirty-eight Years of McGill,' that these years were 'filled with anxieties and cares, and with continuous and almost unremitting labour.' There are on my library table at the present time three volumes, in which three college presidents may be said to have summed up the lifework it has been given them to do for the institutions with which they were severally connected—Caird of Glasgow, Eliot of Harvard, and Gilman of Johns Hopkins. ”

“ If we but follow the ideals of the men who made our University, with [274] their noble sacrifice, their splendid achievement and their unwavering faith as our heritage, the unwritten story of McGill's future will be more glorious even than the record of its past. ”

“ We have a certain pride that we were the pioneers in the field of low-priced periodical literature, and it is in the interest of the truth, which has been more or less distorted in various ways, that we revive the recollection of the position of McClure's Magazine and its price at the time it was started. ”

“ With steps sometimes accelerated, sometimes slow, sometimes even faltering, its movement has been always onward. There have been no stopping-places in its life. It has not been possible here to give adequate notice or even reference to all its benefactors and to all the noble and unselfish men and women who helped in its advancement, to the distinguished graduates and sacrificing professors who brought honour to its name, to the discoveries, the theories and doctrines for improvement, whether intellectual or social or political, first fashioned in its shadow. ”

“ It has a vapid taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate upon—that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge book made its success I was besought by publishers to write others—to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale women, than by my writing. ”

“ Macmillan & Co., for whose ‘Golden Treasury’ series and other publications he produced many beautiful vignettes and portraits, among the latter a series of ‘Scientific Worthies,’ issued in the periodical ‘Nature.’ In 1863 he completed for the Art Union of London the plate commenced by Shenton from Dicksee's ‘A Labour of Love,’ and one of his latest works was ‘Joseph and Mary,’ after Armitage, published by the same society in 1877. ”

“ Let us hope that when the winter is passed we may meet once more, and that I may be able to congratulate you on well merited success, not merely in regard to the prizes and honours which few can obtain, but in that abiding education of the mind and heart, which McGill offers to all her studious children without exception. ”

“ Macaulay, the greatest of living Essayists and Historians, has enriched the Edinburgh Review with volumes of the most magnificent productions of English Literature. And so it is with all the living authors of England. The ablest and the best of their productions are to be found in Magazines. The wealth and freshness of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century are embodied in the pages of its Periodicals.
The Weekly and Daily Journals of England, France, and America, moreover, abound in the most brilliant contributions in every department of intellectual effort. ”

“ A newspaper is as untruthful as an epitaph, Flynn."
"If you dislike the work so much why do you remain on the staff?" I asked.
"I do not dislike it. Being by nature a literary Philistine and vagabond journalist, I love the work. Anyhow, there is nothing else which I can do. If I happened to be placed on a square acre of earth fresh from the hands of the [Pg 281] Creator, and given a spade and shovel to work with, what use could I make of those tools of labour? I could not earn my living with a spade and shovel. It was for the like of us that London and journalism were created." ”

“ Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of all the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except for the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the book called Tales of Space and Time, no short story of mine of the slightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering. ”

“ Sir William Peterson was greatest as a scholar. It is hardly necessary that I refer to his brilliant career as a classical student at Edinburgh and Oxford, his priceless legacy to scholarship in the works of the Latin authors he edited and translated, his successful administration of University College, Dundee, at an extremely difficult time in its history, and his guidance of the affairs of McGill during its period of phenomenal growth from 1895 to 1919; for many of you who were his colleagues are better qualified than I to estimate the value of these activities. ”

“ After deducting the amounts required for insurance, etc., the net revenue was only about £440. Only thirteen students were in attendance; two of these had obtained exhibitions and were admitted free, and the income derived from the fees of the remaining eleven was £110. The salaries, which, however, were several months in arrears, amounted to £292 a year. The Principal received no remuneration. The salary of the Rev. W. T. Leach, Vice-Principal and Professor of Classical Literature, was supposed to be £100; that of T. Guerin, Lecturer in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, £50 ”

“ For while the individual must always vanish in his due time, the College must survive. One fact is certain—after one hundred years of struggle and of ultimate triumph, life still beats strongly in the veins of the University—more actively than in the days of its youth, and more hopefully than at any period in its history. There is a new spirit in McGill. To-day its pulsing life, under the guidance of its great Canadian leader, reaches through all grades and faculties and departments of its students as it has never done before. ”

“ The Larger McGill of Our Day IN writing of the final epoch in McGill's first century, and the larger McGill of our day, we must of necessity be brief. We are too close to that epoch justly to judge its significance, or to give to the events and the incidents of which it is made up the fair and adequate reference which they doubtless deserve. Only the passing of the years can place them in their true perspective. ”

“ I shall permit myself only to say that few can have an adequate idea of the power and forcefulness revealed in the mere fact that one who had so onerous a part to play as a college head should have been able to keep up scientific work at all. ”

“ I say nothing respecting religion, but in the Chapel of the University Lectures on Theology may be given to Protestant students, which Roman Catholics shall not be required to attend. There are many particular regulations which I do not mention, I just furnish a crude outline.
“You are to recollect that if nothing be done, you will soon lose Mr. McGill's donation. The time will never again be so propitious. I say nothing about the nomination of Professors; men of some talent must be selected and of great zeal for the promotion of the Sciences. ”

“ And before Macmillan had delivered up his charge, his pork and hard tack, aided by the ardent suns and sweeping winds of the prairie, had done their work, so that it was a brown and thoroughly hardy looking lad that was handed over to Jimmy Green at the Crossing.
"Here is Jack French's boy," said Macmillan. "And it's him that's got the ear for music. In another trip he'll dust them horses out of a hole with any of us. Swear! Well, I should smile! By the powers! he makes me feel queer." ”

“ Too often one finds mention of Macaulay, Lord; MacCarthy, Desmond; MacLeod, Fiona; even Mackenzie, Compton—but few are the mentions of Machen.
One finds too that the index of a book can be a very revealing thing indeed. We have before us, for example, the memoirs of a Literary Figure of, let us say, the 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The index indicates that our man knew everyone worth knowing. We find Shaw and More, Shelley and Kelley, Shakespeare, Rossetti and Donne, Keats and Yeats, Whistler and Wilde, Moore and Hardy and a generous sprinkling of the nobility. ”

“ We, having taken the premises into Our Royal consideration, and being desirous that an University or College should be established for the Education of Youth in the principles of true religion and for their instruction in the different branches of science and literature, are willing to comply with the prayer of the said petition, and to afford every assistance towards carrying the intentions of the said James McGill into execution. ”

“ It is a period in university life which sees, as a rule, an undreamed of growth and development from small beginnings to unlimited influence, from scanty resources and great disappointments to a large if not always adequate endowment and equipment, from a merely local service to a national and even a world educational power. This is distinctly true of the century of McGill University's story. It began as a College, intended to minister to a very small community. It has grown in one hundred years to serve the world. ”