Albert Paine

"It was his custom to stay in bed until noon, and he remained there during most of the earlier dictations, clad in a handsome dressing gown, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease and found it conducive to thought. On a little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading lamp, making more brilliant his rich coloring and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light and the winter days were dull, the walls of the room a deep, unreflecting red. His bed was a carved antique affair, its outlines blending into the luxuriant background. The whole, focusing to the striking central figure, made a picture of classic value. His talk was absorbingly interesting—it never failed to be that, even when it left something to be desired as history. Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with crystal accuracy."

"Gales of temperament can rage around her—she remains undisturbed ... I have seen her at a time when anyone else would have been distraught with anxiety, come quietly in from the set, eat her lunch calmly and collectedly (for first of all, Lillian believes in keeping fit for her work), then pick up some little book of philosophy and read it steadily until they sent for her."

"With Peard and other officers, Nast stopped at the Hotel Trinacria, and next morning set out to view the city. And now, for the first time, he realized some of the horrors of war. There had been a fierce bombardment from the Neapolitan vessels, also from the Palermo citadel and royal palace, before the final surrender. Ruined palaces were on every hand. Whole districts were in ashes. In some of the houses, families had been burned alive. A multitude of men and women, led by monks and armed with pickaxes, were destroying the hated citadel whose capture had cost them so much. Of this scene the artist made a careful sketch, which appeared in the London News of July 28th."

""Thomas Nast has been our best recruiting sergeant," said Abraham Lincoln near the close of the Civil War. "His emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism, and have always seemed to come just when those articles were getting scarce." The emblematic semi-historical drawings referred to by President Lincoln did not begin until near the end of the second year of the struggle, though from the very commencement of his war work there had been strong sentiment and pictorial value in the young artist's drawings, undoubtedly due to his own intense loyalty to the Union; and these did not fail, through the medium of his forceful skill, to awaken a wide and eager response."