The death of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt is reported from New
York. He died on Tuesday of the disease which kills American millionaires,—failure of the heart. He was only fifty-six years old. He was an important person in the United States, because he possessed a "controlling interest" in a whole system of railroads, but the interest felt in him in Europe is due to the supposition that he was the richest individual in the world. He was nothing of the kind, but he was the most prominent of the mammoth millionaires living in unusual splendour—he had, it is said, an onyx bath—and occasionally giving away money with some liberality. Mr. Rockefeller, a much richer man, probably the richest man on earth, is a much simpler person, and though he might be described as the "Lord of Light" without much exaggeration, controlling as he does the price of petroleum, he does not greatly differ in habits or appear- ance from any well-to-do Congregationalist Minister. Mr. Vanderbilt, though an excellent business man, was not a man of intellectual force, he had no particular objects, and he worked every day and all day with the assiduity of a London barrister just beginning to rise. He never cheated anybody, not even his shareholders, managing his railways so as to pay regular and good dividends, and, indeed, was in all respects very like a hundred thousand other men. The old Roman millionaires were hardly so useful in their generation, but they led bigger lives.
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