GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

Mr. William Potts delivered an address upon George William Curtis, in Sever 11 last night, under the auspices of the Harvard Civil Service Reform Club. The following is an abstract of his address:

George William Curtis was a leader of men. He was such because he was himself a man, a whole man and a true man. He was always, in private as in public, in the home or on the street as upon the rostrum, the knight without peer and without reproach. His fires never paled. What he was before the public, that he was in the grain.

Mr. Curtis was a devoted lover of nature; he was a diligent student and a past master of literature; he had a strong and true appreciation in art, and he was instantly responsive to the appeal of music. All that he was and all that he acquired, he consecrated quietly and without ostentation to the service of mankind. His letters to his father show that in his early manhood there was manifested the same spirit which was to become constantly more prominent in his later years.

He was an author and a lecturer, and an ardent supporter with pen and tongue of the Anti-Slavery cause, and the maintenance of the Union.

After the war there arose many new issues with which the existing parties were ill-organized to deal. Mr. Curtis cherished an increasing interest in Civil Service reform and other matters upon which both parties were divided. This finally resulted in his withdrawal into the attitude of an independent, from which he could work untrammeled for the objects which seemed to him most important.

Mr. Potts spoke with some indignation of the virulent abuse to which Mr. Curtis had been exposed in consequence of the attitude which he had taken, because, like Martin Luther, "so help him God he could do no otherwise." In conclusion he touched briefly upon Mr. Curtis's home life in the country, which kept him constantly fresh and hopeful. His work went on wherever he was, and his study was a charmed retreat. In the leisure hours, his house and his heart were open with the most generous hospitality. He was a superlatively good talker, and he enjoyed talking, and the stream flowed on in his moments of relaxation with the same variety of reflection, of reminiscence and of suggestion, which characterizes the essays from the "Easy Chair," which for so many years charmed their hundreds of thousands of readers.

He was a good listener as well as a good talker. He seemed to expect some valuable contribution from every one, and each left him with a certain sense of added dignity from the conviction that Mr. Curtis had found his suggestions worthy of respectful consideration. Both in public and in private his attitude was that of a "sweet reasonableness."

"It was my sad privilege," said Mr. Potts, "to sit beside him for a little space during the waning summer days, to grasp for the last time the gentle hand, to bear his final greeting to his friends. But as the door closed between us, though it closed forever upon the visible presence, it left impressed upon the heart an ideal image, destined to grow forever more majestic and alike more tender as it approached more closely to the real, for:

"'His life was gentle, and the elements

So mixed in him, that nature might stand up

And say to all the world, This was a man.'"