[Boston—Thursday, 24 November 1870]
Thanksgiving Day. Tom Appleton came in to call & stayed to lunch and until it was time for me to dress for dinner. He was interesting as he always is in talk. I sent to him to ask for money for my coffee-shop which he intends to give me, but he stayed all that time and went away without saying what he would do!!!
He talked of Wendell Phillips & his late address respecting Major Lyman. He was glad young Lyman attacked him, he is far too arrogant, a man proud and tyrannous and unsocial, high time he learned there is someone to question his power to challenge and accuse everybody living and dead. Fine noble points about him, he was a class-mate of mine, but he is too overbearing to endure. The I am holier than thou game he has played long enough.
Much more to this effect: among other things that he never agreed with Longfellow and his sister on their high ideal ground of the right to justice of anti slavery measures.
It needs a great deal of charity I suppose to give Wendell Phillips his due; but his due he must and will have, despite the Col. Lyman’s and the “justi milieu” partisans. He has been one of the strong levers to rid the country of Slavery’s pest.
Appleton was deeply interested in looking over our literary curiosities and hearing Jamie talk about them. Then we went to lunch together. We tried to talk about Dickens, but I do not find anybody who can do that. We who have loved him knew what he was—after that—who can speak. He was however very witty, disjointed and queer as he always is and showed great feeling in talking of his dead dog, of whom he tried to write an epitaph, but having recorded, “Here snow-ball lies,” found his feelings too much for him, whereupon a young poet named Weeks finished the epitaph and it is cut in stone on his small tombstone. He became really tremulous with emotion as he recalled the pretty intelligent ways of the little creature. It was a Pomeranian dog like Miss Dickens’s and indeed this breed of dog seems to be more capable of attachment than any other.
