Arthur Cosslett Smith

Arthur Cassett [sic: Cosslett] Smith was a particularly penetrating judge of men and things; his personality rather than his literary achievements brought him a host of friends—literary and legal, lay and professional. He had traveled far, and in his travels collected objects of art for which he had an exquisite appreciation. Equally of pictures and of letters and life or literary expression, he was a sensitive critic; his own writing was pronounced by the highest judges to be of the very best—disciplined to the last degree of polish yet personal in the same degree, combining wit and wisdom with perfect taste. He had completed half of a historical novel which certain judicious readers of the manuscript declared was as good as Esmond. The failure to complete the book was not because he wrote laboriously; on the contrary, his mind and slow work were strangers. One of his two published books of stories, a fellow-Centurion and member of his publishing house recalls, seemed a little short of matter for a book when the manuscript was in hand: “I asked if he did not have another story to help it out. He did not; but he wrote one the night he received my request and, to my notion, it was the best of all.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1927 Century Association Yearbook