USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III > Part 82
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" The club was regularly organized, and governed by certain rules ; the number of resident members varied from seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen ; there were a few honorary members in other towns or states, who occasionally contributed to its pages. It was one of the rules that every member should write for the work; the contribu- tions were in some cases voluntary, in others were assigned by vote, which was the usual practice in regard to reviews. . . . Nothing was published without the consent of the society.
" The following gentlemen were members of the club, some of them for a short time only, the rest during the greater part of its existence : Rev. Drs. Gardiner, MeKean, Kirkland ; Rev. Messrs. Emerson, Buckminster, S. C. Thacher, and Tucker- man ; Drs. Jackson, Warren, Gorham, and Bigelow; Messrs. W. S. Shaw, P. Thacher, W. Tudor, A. M. Walter, E. J. Dana, William Wells, R. H. Gardiner, B. Wells, James Savage, J. Feild, Professor Willard, Winthrop Sargent, J. Stickney, Alexander H. Everett, J. Head, Jr., George Ticknor.2
" The club met once a week, in the evening; and, after deciding on the manu- scripts that were offered, partook of a plain supper, and enjoyed the full pleasure of literary chat. . .. The meetings were often prolonged into the middle watch, and the member who went away too soon was a subject of pity. It is observed in the records of one evening : · Mr. - , as usual, went away early, on which Mr. - remarked that he was like Mercutio, always killed in the second act.' The concluding minutes of another evening are : 'The society broke up (credite posteri) before eleven o'clock.' . . . The pages of the Anthology were very unequal, but . .. the work undoubtedly
1 [The records of the Anthology Club, 1805- II, are in the cabinet of the Historical Society. See Lee's Lives of the Buckminsters, 128, 323, 407. - ED.]
2 Many other names, since widely known, added brilliancy to the pages of the Anthology.
W. E. Channing, then in the first year of his pastorate at Federal Street, had a paper in the first number, on "Ambition." Andrews Norton was a frequent writer; Nathaniel Bowditch, John Quincy Adams, R. H. Dana, were occasional contributors.
638
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
rendered service to our literature and aided the diffusion of good taste in the commu- nity. It was one of the first efforts of regular criticism on American books, and it suffered few productions of the day to escape its notice." 1 . . .
But the publication of their magazine, which was discontinued at the end of its tenth year, in 1811, was by no means the greatest service which the members of this little elub were able to render to the community in which it flourished.2 It was proposed among them to form an Anthology Reading- room and Library. The plan was taken up with spirit; several of the mem- bers made generous gifts of books; and the enterprise, once set on its feet, commended itself so strongly to the friends of letters outside the club, that a subscription of money was obtained which assured its immediate success. This was the origin of the Boston Athenaeum, - a private institution sustained and fostered by private benefactions, but conducted from the first with an enlightened liberality which has placed it among the most important and useful educational institutions of the city.3
The Anthology, in its turn, expired; and around the pleasant board of the little club (if, indeed, the club survived its parent) other questions exer- eised the minds of its members than the composition of the next number of the magazine. It had, however, served a good purpose, and the literary taste of its members was now free to employ itself in other fields. An opportunity was not long in arriving. Mr. Tudor, whose reminiscenees of the Anthology I have just quoted, confident that there was by this time enough of literary skill in the community to warrant such an undertaking, began in May, 1815, the publication of the North American Review and Miscellaneous Fournal. " It was originally intended," says Mr. Tudor, " to combine the properties of a magazine and a review, and was issued every two months. It continued in this manner until 1818, when it was changed to a quarterly publication. ... My motives in this publication were not wholly selfish. I thought such a work would be of public utility, and that there was talent enough in this vicinity to give it ample support. I began it without sufficient arrangement for aid from others, and was, in conse- quence, obliged to write more myself than was suitable for a work of this description, which requires a variety of style, and much more elaborate investigation of the subjects discussed than any one person can possibly give. I was, however, occasionally assisted by some of the ablest writers we possess." 4
The confidence of Mr. Tudor was more than justified by the result. Under a succession of editors, - of whom Willard Phillips, Edward T.
I Miscellanies, by the author of "Letters on the Eastern States." Boston: 1821.
2 Josiah Quincy said of this club, with most or all of whose members he was more or less intimately acquainted : " Its labors may be con- sidered as a true revival of polite learning in this country, after that decay and neglect which re- sulted from the distractions of the Revolutionary
War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history of the United States." - History of the Boston Athenæum.
[See the Chapter on "Libraries " in Vol. IV .- ED.]
4 Of the first four volumes, three quarters are known to be wholly from his pen. Quincy's Boston Athenaum, app. p. 59.
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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
Channing, Edward Everett, and Jared Sparks were the earliest followers of its originator, - the North American Review maintained its place for more than fifty years at the head of the periodical literature of the country. Willard Phillips In the range of subjects treated, in the ability and learning brought to the discussion of them, in the soundness and justness of its criticisms on the current literature of the day, in the gen- eral temperance, right-mindedness, and consistency of its tone, it established a standard of literary performance of which it is not easy to measure the influence, but which we shall not be likely to value too highly. Among its writers may be found the name of almost every man who has ennobled the literature or the statesmanship of Massachusetts. John Adams, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and A. H. Everett were among the contributors of the first three years. Bancroft, Palfrey, Prescott, among historians; Bry- ant, Longfellow, Dana, Emerson, among poets; Norton, Sparks, Ticknor, Parsons, Story, Savage, among scholars; Jacob Bigelow, Bowditch, Peirce, Gray, among men of science, -such were the names which in the carly history of the North American, before the rapid multiplication of books had begun, upheld in its pages the cause of sound letters, and answered conclu- sively the question as to the possibility of a national literature in America. The day of quarterlies has passed ; the pace of the world of letters, as of the world of business, has grown too rapid to comport with their deliberate and long-drawn articles, and their long intervals of torpor, during which a book may almost be said to be made, read, and forgotten. The habits of these later days require reviews to be prompt, frequent, compact, open to all com- ers, making less account of dignity than of point, and less of consistency than of a nimble wit. We shall be fortunate if the light-armed successors of the North American are able to hold their ground with so much tenacity, and to give, after half a century of work, so good an account of themselves.
.The three periodicals I have noticed are interesting as showing the steady rise of the taste and capacity for letters in Boston in the carly years of the century, and the gradual formation of a literary class, - small indeed in numbers, and limited in scope and strength, and wholly imitative of English models; but exhibiting, ycar by year, a firmer confidence, a steadier grasp of subject, a more independent spirit in criticism, and a hopeful impatience of their own limitations. A very small proportion of this class were able to command sufficient leisure for extended literary work; the hospitable pages of the magazine or review offered them an opportunity for literary recreation of which they were not slow in availing themselves.1
The number of books by native authors, published at this period, is
1 Judge Story, writing in 1819 to Sir William Scott, describes with emphasis this condition of American life : -
"So great is the call for talents of all sorts in the active pursuit of professional and other business in America, that few of our ablest men
have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts, or to composition or abstract sci- ence. This obvious reason ... will explain why we have few professional anthors, and these not among our ablest men." And in the same letter, speaking of having forwarded to his correspond-
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
very small. The publishers, of whom at the opening of the century there were already a half-dozen in the city, showed a commendable enterprise in the reprinting of the English classics. The monthly lists of the Anthology include the names of Shakespeare,1 Popc, Goldsmith, Scott, Southey, Burkc, Adam Smith, Boswell's Johnson, Bacon, Bunyan, Campbell, Paley, Hume, and perhaps others. But except in one department there is but a scanty sprinkling of American writers. That exception consists in the sermons which were poured forth in portentous numbers, without ceasing, - ser- mons and replies to sermons; orations, addresses, and sermons again. These were the mists of the dawn, through which the promise of the day was not undiscernible.2
Even before the beginning of the present century works of more than transient interest and value began to make their appearance at intervals, and examples of sustained literary labor are not wholly wanting. Jeremy Belknap's comprehensive History of New Hampshire, published between the years 1784 and 1792, - of which the first volume was issued at Philadelphia and the other two at Boston, and which, far from limiting itself to the bare recital of historical incidents, treated broadly of the physical geography and the natural history of the State and of the social condition of its people, -was a work of real and substantial value, and was separated from all previous American histories-as of Hubbard, Hutchinson, Prince, Mather, and lesser writers8-by a mental revolution not less marked and decisive than the poli- tical revolution of which it was largely the result. The Puritan tone has dis- appeared, and if the modern philosophic note has not been struck, its hour is visibly at hand. In 1794, Dr. Belknap began in his American Biography the publication of a collection of short biographical memoirs "of those persons who liave been distinguished in America as adventurers, states- men, philosophers, divincs, warriors, authors, and other remarkable charac- ters, comprehending a recital of the events connected with their lives and actions." Beginning with the earliest explorers and continuing with the English settlers of Virginia and New England, the work was interrupted by the author's too early death before the appearance of the second volume.
ent some numbers of a "review published in Boston," presumably the North American, he says : "The review is edited by gentlemen young in life, engaged in active business, and who have searcely a moment of leisure to devote to these pursuits. The labor, too, is voluntary, and with- out profit to themselves." -Story's Life and Letters, i. 320.
1 [See a note to Mr. Clapp's chapter on " The Drama," in Vol. IV .- ED.]
2 As early as 1786, an enthusiastic writer in the Centinel had discovered that the sun was even then risen. "This," he exclaims, "is cer- tainly the age of American literature. The orig- inal performances which have lately appeared in the United States are such as must excite very pleasant emotions in every philanthropick breast.
The memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences do great honour to the gentlemen who compose it, and to the taste of our country. 'The Conquest of Canaan,' by Mr. Dwight ; 'McFingal,' supposed by Mr. Trumbull; the tragedy of 'The Patriot Chief ;' the poems of Arouet; and a collection of twenty-four poems just published in the Southern States, -are in- stances which prove the prophetick inspiration of the Bishop of Cloane to be other than Uto- pian, who, sixty years since, speaking of America, said : -
" "There shall be sung another golden age, The rise of Empire and of Arts.
The good and great inspiring epick rage The wisest heads and noblest hearts.'''
3 [Sce Vol. II .- ED.]
641
THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
Miss Hannah Adams is perhaps the carliest instance in our history of a woman who deliberately devoted herself to a life of literary study and pro- duction. Her View of Religious was published as early as 1784, and met with great success. Her Summary History of New England appeared in 1799, after prolonged research rendered difficult and painful by an impaired eyesight, which did not, however, prevent her from undertaking a still more laborious project, the History of the Fews. Her History of New England was afterward published in an abridged form for the use of schools, - an enterprise which finally involved the good lady in a controversy of prodig- ious length and growing exasperation with the Rev. Jedediah Morse, who after publishing his American Geography and his Gazetteer composed in his turn a Compendious History of New England, also for the use of schools, which Miss Adams maintained to be an infringement upon her own abridgement. The quarrel enlisted a great number of disputants, and extended with more or less vivacity over a period of ten years. Nathaniel Bowditch issued, in 1800, his Practical Navigator, and was perhaps even then consciously preparing himself for the great work which was to make his name as famous in Europe as in America.1 Dr. Abicl Holmes had published, in 1798, his Biography of President Stiles. In 1805 he published his American Annals, a work which, admirable as it is in com- prehensiveness, accuracy, clearness, and compactness of statement, is sin- gular in the strictness of its abstinence from so much as a comment on the events recorded. These are annals only, but very full and complete annals of all that was known cighty years ago concerning the history of the American continent from its discovery by Columbus to the time at which the book was written.2
Mrs. Mercy Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution was published in the same year with Dr. Holmes's work, to which it forms a striking contrast. Mrs. Warren's book, published in her seventy-seventh year, though written some years earlier, is a record of recent events of the most exciting character, in which the writer had the most personal interest, and with many of the actors in which she had an intimate personal acquaintance. The pages glow with a woman's cnthu- siasm, admiration, indignation, and triumph, and are enlivened by the animation, vigor, and wit which had made their author one of the most interesting and most influential of the women of the Revolutionary era.3
In 1803 Thaddeus Mason Harris,4-a man who possessed the truc literary spirit, who was one of the earliest members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and who had held from 1791 to 1793 the office of librarian of
1 [See Professor Lovering's chapter in Vol. IV. - ED.]
2 Jared Sparks, in a review of the second edition, published in 1826, says of this work : " It is the best repository of historical, bio- graphical, and chronological knowledge respect- ing America that can be found embodied in any one work."
VOL. 111 .- 81.
3 [See Mrs. . Cheney's chapter in Vol. IV. John Adams took exception to Mrs. Warren's account of him in this book, sometimes with justice, but too often with an ill-concealed and offensive temper ; and his correspondence with her is printed in 5 Mass. Hist. Coll. iv .- ED.]
4 [See portrait and note in the chapter on " Dorchester," in this volume. - ED.]
642
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Harvard College, - published a compilation of general information called The Minor Encyclopedia, in four small volumes; which served a useful pur- pose as a substitute for the more voluminous Cyclopedia of Rees, then the standard work of its class, and which remained in general use a gener- · ation later. In 1805 Mr. Harris published a volume on a topic, then un- touched : A Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Alle- ghany Mountains : Including a geographical and historical account of the State of Ohio.
The letters of John Adams, which had been printed in the Boston Patriot, were collected and published in a volume in 1809; and in the same year the works of Fisher Ames,1 who had died the year before, were published with a brief memoir. This volume was the subject of a cordial review in the Anthology, by Josiah Quincy.
The biographical dictionaries of Dr. John Eliot and William Allen were published, as it happened, almost simultaneously in 1809. The former work was limited in its scope to "a brief account of the first settlers and other eminent characters among the magistrates, ministers, literary and worthy men in New England." Mr. Allen's dictionary was more general, bringing his biographies down to the time at which he wrote, and including a concise history of the thirtcen colonies. During the next year Dr. Trumbull's General History of the United States appeared, -the last of the histories written in the rigid Puritan temper, with the faith in special providences to a chosen people still unshaken.
The Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory of John Quincy Adams, delivered to the students of Harvard College during his brief professorship, and which 9. 2. Adams. became widely celebrated as examples of the art of which they treated, were published in two large volumes in 1810. In the same year appeared Isaiah Thomas's not less celebrated History of Printing. Thomas, long a prosperous printer in Worcester, established himself in 1788 in Boston with Ebenezer T. Andrews, where the business increased so rapidly that in a few years they had established branch houses in Baltimore, Albany, and perhaps one or two other cities. They were the publishers of the Massachusetts Magazine. In the publication of school-books they acquired something like a monopoly, and most of those used throughout the United States for a generation bore the familiar imprint of Thomas & Andrews. Of the History of Printing, the constant references to it in the chapters of this work 2 which treat of the Press and Literature of the earlier periods are sufficient evi- dence of the value and interest. Thomas was an enlightened and liberal- minded man, and his love and appreciation of good literature are abundantly exhibited in all that we know of his honorable and successful career. He was one of the most active of the founders of the American Antiquarian Society in 1812; was president of the society till his death in 1831, and
1 [See note to Mr. Lodge's chapter in this -ED.] 2 [See Vol. II. p. 410, for Thomas's portrait. volume. - ED.]
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643
THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.
endowed it by his will, bequeathing to it his valuable library and a building for its use.
If we look through these early years for works of imagination, whether of poetry or prose fiction, we shall find little to cheer us. Fiction is long represented by Mrs. Susannah Rowson, prominent during the first twenty years of this century as a successful teacher of young ladies in Boston and Medford, as she had been prominent at an earlier age as a sprightly and graceful actress. She was the editor of the Boston Weekly Magazine, a periodical in quarto form, published by Samuel Gilbert and Thomas Dcan, and which had an existence of three years. For this magazine Mrs. Row- son wrote a serial story, running through thirty-three numbers, called "Sincerity," and published in 1813 in book form, by Charles Williams, under the new title of Sarah, the Exemplary Wife. Charlotte Temple and Reuben and Rachel were novels of which perhaps the most that can be said is that they were the best produced as yet on these shores; yet of the former Buckingham says twenty-five thousand copies were sold in a few years.
As to poetry, - Joseph Story,1 then twenty-five years old, printed in 18042 a poem in heroic metre, entitled the Power of Solitude, with some fugitive verses added ; but I have seen it stated that at a maturer age he burned all the copies he could get possession of. The only other poetical publication I know of, belonging to these early years, is a thin volume which appeared in 1808, called The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times, - a ferocious attack on the administration of Jefferson and the statesmen connected with it. This was the singular beginning of the poetical life of William Cullen Byrant. He was but fourteen years old when this little poem was pub- lished; and the second edition of it, issued the next year, contained a note from his father, drawn from him by some doubts which had been expressed as to the age of the author, and certifying that the poem was written before his son had completed his fourteenth year.
As regards the production of literary works, the century since the close of the Revolutionary War divides itself naturally enough into four periods, not very unequal in point of time, - the first extending to the establishment of the North American Review; the second ending with the first publica- tion of the Dial, in 1840; the third with the breaking out of the Rebellion. Of the first period we have already made a review which, however hasty and superficial, is sufficient to show that, along with a lamentable but not unnatural poverty of literary resources, there existed the material for rapid and substantial improvement in the future. We shall see, as we go on, how steady was the growth of the literary spirit as the complement of the na- tional growth in wealth and material consequence.
Taking, then, the establishment of the North American Review as the beginning of our second period, it is evident that at that time there
1 [See his portrait and references in Mr.
Morse's chapter in Vol. IV. - ED.]
2 The same year in which he published his first legal work, Pleadings in Civil Actions.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
existed no general literary culture outside the small circles of educated and well-to-do persons like that from which this Review and its forerunner, the Anthology, had sprung. It was to these circles that the publishers com- mended the slender editions of the foreign and domestic authors which they ventured to send forth. Dwellers in the country, and to a large extent dwellers in the city as well, were content to depend on the semi-weekly newspaper, with its poor little budget of news, its borrowed fragment of tale or essay, and its bit of watery poetry in the corner of the last page. A copy of the Pilgrim's Progress, or the Saints' Rest, might not improbably find its place with the family Bible on the table of the best room, and a well used copy of the spelling-book or Farmer's Almanack lay more ready to hand in the family living-room or kitchen. Of the limited extent to which the diffusion of wholesome literature had proceeded, we have an illustration in the works which were from time to time compiled, to serve as reading- books in the schools. Of these books, the most successful and widely used at the time we are considering were perhaps the two published by Caleb Bingham, - the American Preceptor, of which the first edition was published in 1794, and the Columbian Orator, which followed two years later. Succes- sive editions of both these works were issued, and for a full generation they continued in general use in the district schools of New England. Of the two, the Columbian Orator was perhaps the more popular, and held its place the longer. It contained, in the words of the title-page, " a variety of orig- inal and selected pieces, together with rules calculated to improve youth and others in the ornamental and useful art of eloquence." It was a forbidding and gloomy compilation. Of eighty pieces here brought together, four were on the Day of Judgment; thirteen were fragments of speeches in Parlia- ment, on topics which had for the most part long lost their interest for American readers. Speeches in Congress, speeches to the Roman Senate and people, civic and academic orations on the greatness of the United States, on the power of eloquence, on the glory of independence, furnished another large proportion of the whole. There were thirteen poetical ex- tracts from such sources as the David and Goliath or the Moses in the Bul- rushes of the excellent Hannah More, from Addison's Cato, from Rowe's Tamerlane. To all this dismal entertainment the only relief was a scene from a farce of Garrick, and a bit of Miss Burney's Camilla, turned into a dialogue. Nothing illustrates more forcibly the forlorn condition of mind in which our forefathers walked through this vale of tears than such a collec- tion of their children's school-pieces.1 From the Columbian Orator of Caleb Bingham to the American First-Class Book of John Pierpont is but a few years in time ; but what an advance in breadth and capacity of understand- ing! The amelioration in the mental and spiritual condition of the people
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