"You will probably be asked to find room in your columns for many letters from the friends of E. P. Roe. I apply for admission with the others, on the ground that none of them could have loved him more than I did. The telegram which to-day told me of his death has made my own life less interesting to me. He was so good a man that no one can take his place with those who knew him. It is the simple truth that he cared for his friends more than for himself; that his greatest happiness was to see others happy; that he would have more rejoiced in the literary fame of one of his friends than in any such fame of his own winning. All his leisure was spent in making plans for the pleasure and profit of other people. I have seen him laugh with delight at the success of these plans. As I write, so many generous, sweet, noble deeds of his throng in my memory,--deeds done so unobtrusively, delicately and heartily,--that I feel the uselessness of trying to express his value and our loss. He was at once manly and childlike: manly in honor, truth, and tenderness; childlike in the simplicity that suspects no guile and practises none. He had in him that rare quality of loving sympathy that prompted sinners to bring their confessions to him, and ask help and counsel of him,--which he gave, and human love into thebargain. Among his million readers, thousands wrote to thank him for the good that his books had awakened in their souls and stimulated in their lives. He knew the human heart, his own was so human and so great; and the vast success of his stories, however technical critics may have questioned it, was within his deserts, because it was based on this fact. No one could have had a humbler opinion of Roe's 'art' than he had: but an author who believes that good is stronger than evil, and that a sinner may turn from his wickedness and live, and who embodies these convictions in his stories, without a trace of cant or taint of insincerity,--such an author and man deserves a success infinitely wider and more permanent than that of the skilfulest literary mechanic: and it is to the credit of our nation that he has it."
Authors' Club, 19 West 24th Street, New York. January 19, 1889.