So he took his two volumes with him on this voyage of emancipation. And, before he came to Cincinnati, he had forgotten the eccentricities and was as eager as the youngest of us to praise the historian. I remember as well how, as he explained to my father his plans for the “North American Review,” he said he had secured Emerson to write, and that Emerson would let him have some of his lectures. He had taken care to provide, however, that these were to be from the historical lectures and not the speculative ones. If he had been pressed, I am afraid he would have been found to be of the large circle of those who in those days thought Emerson “a little crazy.”
Under this chief worked the Mutual Admiration Society—all older than Lowell. But with all of them, sooner or later, he became intimate. All of them are still remembered: Charles Sumner; George Stillman Hillard, Sumner’s law partner and, in earlier days, intimate friend; H.W. Longfellow; Cornelius Conway Felton, Greek professor at Cambridge, and afterwards president of the college; and Henry Russell Cleveland. Longfellow knew that there were worlds outside of London and Edinburgh, Boston and Cambridge, and their environs. We youngsters, from the proud advantage of the age of twenty or less, would have said that the rest of the Mutual Admiration Society, in the year 1840, did not suspect this.
The “North American” had been founded after the “Monthly Anthology” had led the way, twelve years before. It was confessedly in imitation of the Edinburgh and London quarterlies, as the London Quarterly had confessedly imitated the Edinburgh. The original plan was a good one, and any youngsters of to-day who will revive the old quarterly may find that it meets a “felt want” again. Look at an old “Edinburgh” of Brougham’s time and you will find an intelligent account of some forty books, which you will never read yourself, but which you want to know about. To tell the whole abject and bottom truth, you do not find exactly this thing in any English or American “Review” published in 1898.
The “North American” had been under the charge of both Everetts—Edward and Alexander. Alexander Everett assumed the editorial direction on his return from Europe in 1830, and from him it passed into Dr. Palfrey’s hands. I may say in passing that if I had at my bank the money which the Everetts and their family connections paid for establishing this national journal, with compound interest on the same, I could be living to-day in my palace at Newport, and entertaining the Duke of Edinburgh, the Bishop of London, and the Vicar-General of North America. Probably I am better off as I write in the somewhat dingy Albany station of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. This is a parenthesis, with the indulgence of my readers.
We all read the “North American” regularly. As I have implied, we who were ten years younger than the Mutual Admiration Society made fun of it. We said that they could not review a book of poems without a prefatory essay on poetry. We said that Horace Walpole made their fortune; that they would not publish a number without an article on Walpole. But I cannot now find more than three or four articles on Walpole or even his times in those years.
The truth was that literature was not yet a profession. The men who wrote for the “North American” were earning their bread and butter, their sheets, blankets, fuel, broadcloth, shingles, and slates, in other enterprises. Emerson was an exception; and perhaps the impression as to his being crazy was helped by the observation that these “things which perish in the using” came to him in the uncanny and unusual channel of literary workmanship. Even Emerson printed in the “North American Review” lectures which had been delivered elsewhere. He told me in 1849, after he had returned from England, that he had then never received a dollar from the sale of any of his own published works. He said he owned a great many copies of his own books, but that these were all the returns which he had received from his publishers. And Mr. Phillips told me that when, after “English Traits,” published by him, had in the first six months’ sales paid for its plates and earned a balance besides in Emerson’s favor, Emerson could not believe this. He came to the office to explain to Mr. Phillips that he wanted and meant to hold the property in his own stereotype plates. And Mr. Phillips had difficulty in persuading him that he had already paid for them and did own them. Emerson was then so unused to the methods of business that Mr. Phillips had also to explain to him how to indorse this virgin check, so that he could place it to his own bank account.
Mr. Phillips, then of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, was Emerson’s near connection by marriage; Mrs. Phillips, a charming and accomplished lady, being Emerson’s cousin on the Haskins side.
To return to the “North American Review.” The five young gentlemen whom I have named were all favorites in the best circles of the charming social life of that little Boston. I cannot see that their fondness for each other can have much affected their work for the “North American,” for whatever they published appeared long after they had won their name.
They were in the habit of looking in at what began to be called the “Old Corner Bookstore,” which is still, as it was then, an excellent shop, where you find all the last books, the foreign magazines, and are sure of intelligent attention. The memory of modern man does not run back to the time when there was not a “bookstore” in this old building, which bears on its rough-cast wall the date of 1713. The antiquarians would tell us that on the same spot as early as 1634 there was the first “ordinary” in Boston. And it was just above here, under the sign of Cromwell’s Head, that Colonel George Washington and his elegant little troop made their home when that young Virginian visited Governor Shirley in 1756.
The Corner Bookstore in that generation was the shop of Allen & Ticknor, and not long before there had appeared in the shop, as the youngest boy, James T. Fields, from Portsmouth, who was destined to be the friend of so many men of letters, and who has left behind him such charming memorials of his own literary life. It must be to Fields, I think, that we owe the preservation of the epigram which the Club made upon “In Memoriam.” I will not say that the story did not improve as it grew older, but here it is in the last edition:—