nation. Thus he grew to be of all our writers the least imitative, the most surely individual. The circumstances of his life combined with the sensitiveness of his nature to make his individuality indigenous. Beyond any one else, then, he expresses the deepest temper of that New England race which brought him forth, and which now, at least in the phases we have known, seems vanishing from the earth.

XV

THE DECLINE OF NEW ENGLAND

AMONG the numerous writers of the New England Renaissance on whom we have not touched there were doubtless some who wrote significantly. The unconscious selection of the public, however, has preferred those on whom we have consequently found it worth our while to dwell. What is more, little was thought or said in nineteenth-century New England, and above all little was written there which will not fall under one or another of the heads which we have considered. The earlier volumes of the "Atlantic," for example, taken with the "Dial" and the "North American Review,” represent the literature of this period; and although among the contributors to each you may find persons whom we have neglected, you will be at pains to find in any of them traces of any general spirit in the air with which our study has not now made us reasonably familiar.

It is hard, too, quite to realise that we have been dealing not with the present but with the past. The days of the Renaissance are still so recent that plenty of Bostonians instinctively feel its most eminent figures to be our contemporaries. As we begin to ponder over the group of our lately vanished worthies, however, the most obvious fact about them grows to seem that they represent a kind of eminence which no longer distinguishes New England.

The social history of Boston, one begins to see, has been exceptional. Early in the reign of Charles II., Cotton Mather was born there. Living all his life in that remote colonial town, he managed, both as a man of science and as a

busy theological writer, to win European recognition. Any American, it is said, who went abroad during Cotton Mather's lifetime, was apt to be asked whether he knew this one American whose name had strayed beyond the limits of his country. Cotton Mather died in 1728, forty-eight years before the Declaration of Independence; but he had been personally known to at least one distinguished signer of that document, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, of course, lived little in Boston, and not at all after his early youth. During the middle half of the eighteenth century, then, one may perhaps say that Boston, although it contained men of unusual intelligence and power, contained few if any whose eminence was more than locally visible. By the time of the American Revolution, however, a leading citizen of Boston was John Adams, whose reputation as a public man ultimately become worldwide; and in the Boston of his day Adams's personality was not obviously exceptional. Though his attainment of the national presidency made him at last more conspicuous than any of his New England contemporaries, he was at home only one of an able and distinguished company. President Adams survived the Declaration of Independence by precisely half a century; he died on the 4th of July, 1826. At that time the Boston on which his eyes closed already contained many men not only of power, but of such eminence that at one time or another they attained far more than local recognition. John Quincy Adams, then President of the United States, was a diplomatist known throughout Europe. Daniel Webster and Edward Everett were members of Congress from Boston, George Ticknor was Smith Professor at Harvard, William Ellery Channing was in the very flood-tide of his career, and young Ralph Waldo Emerson was just being licensed to preach.

The name of Emerson carries us to another literary epoch. In 1879, Holmes, in his Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, wrote of that Saturday Club at which we have already glanced :—

"This Club, of which we were both members, and which is still flourishing, came into existence in a very quiet sort of way at about the same time as the Atlantic Monthly,' and although entirely unconnected with that magazine, included as members some of its chief contributors. Of those who might have been met at some of the monthly gatherings in its earlier days I may mention Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Longfellow, Motley, Whipple, Whittier; Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John S. Dwight; Governor Andrew, Richard H. Dana, Junior, Charles Sumner. It offered a wide gamut of intelligences, and the meetings were noteworthy occasions. If there was not a certain amount of mutual admiration' among some of those I have mentioned it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the nature of men who were otherwise largely endowed. The vitality of this Club has depended in a great measure on its utter poverty in statutes and by-laws, its entire absence of formality, and its blessed freedom from speech-making."

In Mr. Morse's biography of Holmes there is a note referring to this Club, in which he mentions among its members a number of other gentlemen still living and these among the dead: Felton, once President of Harvard College; Prescott; Tom Appleton; J. M. Forbes; Henry James, the elder; William Hunt, the painter; Charles Francis Adams; Francis Parkman; James Freeman Clarke; Judge John Lowell; Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar; and Bishop Brooks. Including Holmes, this gives us twenty-six members of the Club, all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance. Another member, we have already seen, was Fields. Twenty-seven names, then, we have mentioned in all, so carelessly collected that one so familiar as that of Fields was accidentally omitted. Among the six least widely known of the company, two had attained more than local reputation as men of letters. Edwin Percy Whipple was generally recognised as a professional literary critic; and if Mr. Dana had lacked the claim to eminence which his admirable career at the bar deserved, and which was deserved as well by his high-minded devotion to the cause of antislavery at a time when such devotion demanded rare courage, he would still be remembered among our lesser literary figures as the writer of that excellent record of sea-life,

"Two Years Before the Mast." President Felton and Tom Appleton and John Lowell, on the other hand, left behind them little literary record; whoever knew them, however, must remember them as men of such wit and breeding as would have been exceptional anywhere; and any memory which embraces them will embrace too the figure of Mr. Forbes, a merchant of those elder days when mercantile Boston had something of the quality which tradition would confine to the old-world merchants who wore their swords.

This list, we must remember, is merely accidental, — the list of a few men who chanced to become fellow-members of a small, intimate Club. In the Boston where they lived they were not the only men of eminence. Webster was their fellow-citizen; so was Everett; so was Choate; so were Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips; so was Mr. Winthrop. The list might extend indefinitely. Between 1840 and 1860, indeed, Boston was probably the spot in the English-speaking world where in proportion to the population a visitor was most apt familiarly to meet men whose reputation had extended as far as our language, amid fellow-citizens who seemed in all respects their equals.

In January, 1893, there suddenly died at Boston the late Bishop of Massachusetts, the youngest man whose name is included in Mr. Morse's list of the Saturday Club. Phillips Brooks, born in 1835, and graduated at Harvard at the age of twenty, was early known throughout the English-speaking world as among the few great preachers of his day. Cotton Mather had reached his full maturity in 1700; in 1875 Phillips Brooks was at the height of his powers; and it is hardly too much to say that throughout those hundred and seventy-five years Boston had bred or had attracted to itself a succession of undeniably eminent men. To-day there has come a marked change. The city still possesses men of power, of breeding, of culture. Even a critic so little disposed to commendation as Mr. Godkin has lately mentioned