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somewhat of my old feeling about the mental training of the man who, while in the Law School, could write a paper so admirable as
Cabot's essay entitled “
Immanuel Kant” ( “Dial,” IV, 409), an essay which seems to me now, as it then seemed, altogether the simplest and most effective statement I have ever encountered of the essential principles of that great thinker's philosophy.
I remember that when I told
Cabot that I had been trying to read
Kant's “Critique of pure reason” in an English translation, but could not understand it, he placidly replied that he had read it twice in German and had thought he comprehended it, but that
Meiklejohn's translation was beyond making out, so that I need not be discouraged.
After graduating from the Law School, he went for a year into a law office in Boston, acting as senior partner to my classmate, Francis Edward Parker, who, being a born lawyer, as Cabot was not, found it for his own profit to sever the partnership at the end of a year, while Cabot retired from the profession forever.
His German training had meanwhile made him well known to the leaders of a new literary enterprise, originating with Theodore Parker and based upon a meeting at Mr. Emerson's house in 1849, the object being the organization
