The Saint Paul globe., 1902-12-04
.EULOCY OF OCHILTREE
WATTERsoN's TRIBUTE TO IAST
OF THE RoMANTIcISTS."
Says No Other Region In christcnf.om
Could Have Evolved Just Such a Prod
uct Save the Southern States of North
Ameriea-Was Prodiaious Fayorite
With Women. "a.

Albeit not an easy, it is, at the same
time,. melancholy undertaking for one
Ochiltree-it sounds like pseudonym,
does it not?-with his dead body lying,
as it were, in the house; to separate the
sentimental and the spectacular; to dis
joke of life and his other and more Seri-
Gus self; to identify the exhuberant and
sometimes noisy hunorist with the man
,+ Of affairs' ar the too aggresGsive poitieaan
rule such contradictions of character
are discoverable by women. The cir
cumstance may explain another idiosyn-
Grassy ofthe famous Texan. With wom-
en- he was a prodigious favorite. Nor
less in Nacogdoches, where he was born,
and Galveston, which he represented in
woman to know him without loving him,
than in London and Paris, where, among
the highest some eyes will glisten that
are not won't to hetray nd eme5G whilst nns
of the working guild of art and letters
tears will flow over the knowledge that
he is dead; for, whatever he was to men,
he was an angel to women, was Tom
Ochiltree; knight-errant If ever
knight errant lived in the prosaic modern
world of ours.
have evolved just such product save the
Southern states of North America. In
him the blood of Virginia and South Car
olina and Georgia, stirred and mingled by
found its fruition in Texas His enemits
describe that fru1tion as rank; 1T was
simply gorgeous. The son of Titan who
had helped to make the Republic Of the
Lonely Star, he grew to manhood amid
the social crudities, the eXtravagances and
eXcesses of the frontiers of civilization,
motherleSS boy with no, restraining inf1u-
ence to check and guide his wayward
footsteps, and he dies, the very last OF
the romanticists of the middle ages of our
American renaissance, having penetrated
fhn q or Af Ia
wide world over, without losing his faith
either in his God or his kind, emerging
thence with vast store OF worldly wis
dom, yet no tinge of acerbity and very lit
tie cyniciSm. In his youth bumptiouS,
overgrown lad, ambitious and f1amboy-
ant, he had not possessed the knowledge
or training to discriminate. Harlequin
was good enough for him, and all seasons.
summer in quest of an audience. 1.-THE
worlds mine oyster-which I with tongue
will ope." Recognition at any price.
iltree & Father He was himself the
originator of the epigram Of the three
liars-"Tom Ochiltree is one," and, nam
ing celebrated journalist whom for the
moment he did not like, lis the other
two He told the most whimsical sto-
ries at his own expense. He became
means, or any care to the making of a
career. Grant appointed him marshal OF
Texas. 1t was joke. His district elect
ed him to congress. It was a. Joke: II
of the house without an effort to stay
there and still jesting at his own expense.
"I know very well how to live on nothing
a year. but I'm dashed if I know how to
live on $4,000 a year.
Countless such illustrations of his pc
culiar wit might be related His converse
ton abounded with them. He was not like
Travers in his scintillations, nor like
Jerome in his grotesquerie; yet he had
touch of both of them, crossed on Texas:
Behind this 7frivolity, the jocund love of
riryir,c md nf Twin TlIa
was brain throbbing with ideas and
heart as loyal, ardent and fearless as ever
beat in the bosom of an untaught uncal-
culating barbarian; for in the highest,
nobleSt sense a barbarian he was born and
a barbarian he remained to the end; un-
spoiled by the solid prosperity that came
to him as a result of his genius in real
affairs, or by the Establishments Of the
great and titled ones who welc5med him
in the great capitals; unseduced in his fine
intellectual and moral structure by. the
affected rather in London and Paris than
in New York; untainted in the rare old
china of his Southern chivalry, which,
with all his heedlessness, he had, amid
the surrounding viciousneSs, huggei sS an
heirloom to his bosom; too buoyaut, too
aggressive, eXternaf to his lifelong dis
advantage, putting weapons into the hands
of his enemies, of whom he had his share;
but, within, man of serious conviction
and genuine moral courage, and, at the
close despite vast accumulation of worldly
knowledge and some money, his heart
where it was in the beginning; with the
weak against the strong; with the inno-
cent against the corrupt; man every inch
of himi-Louisyille Courier Journal