The Friendly Club and Other Portraits

JOEL BARLOW >FROM AN ENGRAVING BY DURAND AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY ROBERT FULTON
Copyright, 1922, By Edwin Valentine Mitchell First Edition PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To The Memory of My Father
NOTE
THE thanks of the author are due to Mr. Charles Hopkins Clark, Editor of The Hartford Courant, in which most of the following essays originally appeared anonymously, for permission to republish them in the revised, enlarged and sometimes entirely re-written form in which they are here presented. The Friendly Club, The Mystery of the Bell Tavern and Our Battle Laureate have not been previously printed.
Citation of authorities, except so far as they appear in the text, has been considered inappropriate in the case of such informal articles as these. It would be ungracious, however, to omit mention of the writer's indebtedness in connection with the second essay to Mr. Charles Knowles Bolton's The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, which is the latest and most comprehensive document on this baffling incident of New England social history.
F. P.
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS

A HARVARD man, not exempt from the complacency sometimes attributed to graduates of his university, once observed, according to Barrett Wendell, that the group of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close of the eighteenth century attained a brief measure of fame as the Hartford Wits, represents the only considerable literary efflorescence of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the rejoinder, doubtless from a Yale source, that nevertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits flourished no Harvard man had produced literature half so good as theirs.