Stow, Massachusetts, as colleague pastor with Rev. Jonathan Newell, who was then very aged and infirm, and died during the following year. Mr. Sibley as a parish minister won the warm regard and affection of the families under his charge; and among his visitors during his last illness were younger members of some of those families, with whom his pastorate had been a cherished tradition from their parents or grandparents. He was assiduous in all offices of sympathy and kindness, and had an instinctive discernment of the occasions on which such offices were needed or desired, so that his was always a welcome presence in the homes of his people, while they saw in him a pattern of the Christian virtues which he inculcated from the pulpit. In 1833 he resigned his pastorate, and seldom appeared in the pulpit afterward. The reasons for this course were numerous rather than individually strong. While embodying Christianity in his life, he was not specially interested in the critical study of its records, which was then, more than now, the habit of the profession. Then, too, he

did not write with ease and fluency on subjects not connected with history or biography. At the same time he had a homelonging for Cambridge and the Library, from which he was removed by a half-day's journey or more. The lack of family relations and ties also made his change of condition all the easier, and may have turned the scale in favor of new plans and pursuits.

He entered on several publishing enterprises, the chief of which was the " American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge," conducted in connection with the Boston Bewick Company, which supplied it with wood-engravings in the best style of the art as then practised, and not without substantial worth by the higher standard of our time. Of this monthly journal, which was published for three years, Mr. Sibley was for most of the time the principal editor, and so far as there were losses to be incurred, the chief proprietor, though, if there were profits, they went elsewhere. This magazine was designed to occupy a place like that of the " London Penny Magazine." It was, in fact, a non-alphabetical encyclopedia of history, biography, zoology, architecture, music, and popular science, containing in each number a medley of information of transient importance, with a large amount of matter of permanent value, while the copious pictorial illustrations were of a

During Mr. Sibley's administration, and when not directly, almost always indirectly through his agency, the Library was quadrupled in the titles in its catalogue and in its annual income available for the purchase of books. He seemed Arguseyed in the discernment of sources of supply, and equally alert in discovering the hiding-places of old books and pamphlets. and in laying claim to fresh issues from the press. Collections that had long lain neglected in garrets and lumber-rooms were carefully examined, and often with rich "finds." Even junk-shops were ransacked and dealers in paper-stock waylaid; and not infrequently the only known copies of documents of great historical value were rescued at the very threshold of the paper-mill. At the same time many publishers were made to understand that gift-copies of whatever they printed were due to the College, and the same obligation was successfully urged on not a few authors, whether alumni or elsewhere educated. Visitors also were so hospitably received, and persons who needed to make temporary use of the Library were so courteously treated, as often to elicit a donation of books as an expression of gratitude. Several of the largest gifts and bequests of money to the Library were the result of Mr. Sibley's immediate effort or influence; others, of his endeavors to keep this special need of the College prominently in view before its graduates and benefactors. In addition to his general care for the Library, there were several departments in which he was at great pains to obtain complete collections. Thus he never failed somehow to procure every town history that came to his knowledge. As to the War of the Rebellion, also, he spared no efforts in bringing together books, pamphlets, loose sheets and cuttings, in fine, whatever could be of avail for the future historian of the war.

Mr. Sibley's industry in behalf of the College was by no means confined to his official duties. He edited ten Triennial Catalogues, commencing with that of 1842. For his first issue he corrected many dates which had before been erroneously given, ascertained dates especially of honorary degrees from other colleges which had been omitted, and supplied middle names in full, a very arduous work, yet practicable, inasmuch as middle names had come into common use within the memory of men then living. In the edition of 1845 he inserted, for the first time, the dates of the deaths of graduates,

requiring an amount of research and correspondence which hardly any other man would have had the courage to undertake or the perseverance to carry through. Meanwhile, making use of some interleaved catalogues which came into his hands, he distributed such catalogues among persons on whose vigilance and accuracy he could rely, so that he might have not only the death-record of those who died, but notice of such offices and honors as were to be inserted to the credit of those still living; while he kept himself daily conversant with the journals, reports, and documents of every kind that could furnish materials for his use. In later editions there was an "appeal to graduates and others," for detailed information, under specified heads, concerning "any graduate who may ever have lived in the towns where they reside." The successive editions show, also, such progressive improvement in the arrangement of their contents and in the details of typography as to place Mr. Sibley's last catalogue in contrast rather than in comparison with those published prior to his editorship. It may well be doubted whether in a record of that kind there has ever been attained a more nearly entire elimination of error, or a smaller proportion of omissions of what, if known, might have claimed insertion.

From 1850 to 1870 Mr. Sibley also edited the Annual College Catalogue, a less severe, but by no means an easy task for one who meant that the work should be wholly free from omission, mistake, and misprint, which was his successful aim.

In connection with these labors, we may not unfitly name Mr. Sibley's pamphlet entitled "Notices of the Triennial and Annual Catalogues of Harvard University, with a Reprint of the Catalogues of 1674, 1682, and 1700" (Boston, 1865, 8vo, pp. 67). This little book is full of matter of interest to Harvard graduates, and comprises incidentally an account of the various methods and agencies by which the author had been enabled to make his own work so eminently thorough and trustworthy. His only error was in printing a very small number of copies, instead of depending on the esprit de corps of Harvard graduates for an extended sale. We are glad that the substance of this work has its permanent place in the Proceedings of our Society.

Joseph Palmer, M.D., (H. U. 1820,) had, not without large. aid from Mr. Sibley, published annually at the Commencement

season a Necrology of the graduates of Harvard College, with biographical notices. In 1870 he was too much enfeebled by what proved to be fatal illness to perform this labor; and Mr. Sibley took it in charge, issuing a complete list of the deceased graduates of each academic year from 1870 to 1885, inclusive, with such salient dates and facts in each life-record as had been entered in his copious memoranda or came in any way to his knowledge. Dr. Palmer, in the last year of his life, collected and published in an octavo volume his annual series. We hope that the like may be done with the sixteen years' record furnished by Mr. Sibley, which would preserve many names, dates, and facts that ought not to be lost from memory.

While he kept his room at Divinity Hall, his expenses were incredibly small, not because he was penurious, but because he had been trained and for a large part of his life compelled to live on very little, and his wants had always been within his means. To the day of his death what were necessaries to most men were to him superfluities neither needed nor desired. But no sooner had he the scanty salary of an assistantlibrarian than he found use for the surplus income which his economy created in aiding the poor students around him by gifts, and by loans without security and often never repaid; while there was probably no one of his beneficiaries that would have been willing to live as frugally as he himself lived.

In 1860 his father died, leaving to him, his only surviving child, the savings of a long life of strenuous and self-denying industry, amounting in the whole to less than five thousand dollars. Of the disposal which he made of this inheritance we can best tell in his own words. We will give in full his letters to the Principals, Trustees, and Treasurer of Phillips Exeter Academy, barely breaking the series to record the one event in his life most essential to his happiness and well-being. We publish these letters as a chapter of autobiography, for in all their details they are eminently characteristic of the writer. It ought to be said that at the time of his last donation his whole property was less than the entire sum that he had given to the Academy, so that, while he would have submitted to the utmost straitness before he would have claimed any portion of the income of his donation, it was the dictate of a wise discretion for him to retain a contingent claim upon it.