Abbey

As an illustrator, Abbey combined daintiness with a fair measure
of dramatic feeling for the pose. A modicum of old Benjamin West's
tendency to the grandiose would have done Abbey no harm; but if his
imagination balked at the higher flights often attained by Gustave
Dore, and sometimes by Elihu Vedder, yet there is a charm in his
sobriety, there is something which compels our respect in the
workmanlike method, in the evidences of thoroughness which appeared
in all he wrought. Some of his Shakespeare figures linger in the
memory like that of Iago as played by Edwin Booth, or that of
Rosalind as played by Modjeska.
--Charles de Kay

Edwin A. Abbey was born in Philadelphia (not of his own choosing) in
the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two. His parents were blessed in
that they had neither poverty nor riches. Their ambition for Edwin
was that he should enter one of the so-called Learned Professions;
but this was not to the boy's taste. I fear me he was a heretic
through prenatal influences, for they do say that he was a child of
his mother. This mother's mind was tinted with her Quaker
associations until she doubted the five points of Calvinism and had
small faith in the Thirty-nine Articles. She was able to think for
herself and act for herself; and as she perceived that the preachers
were making a guess, so she discovered that doctors with bushy
eyebrows, who wore dogskin gloves in Summer and who coughed when you
asked them a question--gaining time to formulate a reply--didn't
know much more about measles, mumps, chicken-pox and whooping-cough
than she did herself. Philadelphia has always had a plethora of
Medical Journals and dogmatic doctors. Living in Philadelphia and
having had a little experience with doctors, Mrs. Abbey let them
severely alone and prescribed the pediluvium, hop-tea, sulphur and
molasses and a roll-up in warm blankets for everything--and with
great success. Beyond this she filled the day with work and kept
everybody else at work. The moral of Old Deacon Buffum, "Blessed is
the man who has found some one to do his work," had no place in her
creed. To her, every one had his work that no other could do, and
every day had its work which could not be done any other day, and
success and health and happiness lay in doing well whatever you
attempted.

Having eliminated two of the Learned Professions from her ambitions
for her boy, the Law was left as the only choice.

To be a Philadelphia lawyer is a proud and vaulting ambition.
Philadelphia lawyers are exceedingly astute, and are able to confuse
the simplest propositions, thus hopelessly befogging judge and jury.
On the banks of the Schuylkill all jurors are provided with dice so
as to decide the cases with