of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but
preserving becoming reticence. There was almost a Bostonese austerity
about the great men of that early time and circle. They wore their
garments as Roman Senators wore their togas. It was not good form for
the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals. To have
done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was
the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he
sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson,
and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident
genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"
at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid
intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than
Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so
persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer
been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe
come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a
black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the
impossible and unclubable personality.

After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant. He held the office
until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was
seldom seen at the club except in official meetings. An enthusiastic
Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant's death, when it
had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn
together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York. "Without
formality or design, it had become an institute of mutual enlightenment
among men knowing the worth of one another's work, likened by Bellows,
more than half seriously, to the French Academy. A sure result of this
communion was absolute equality among those who shared it. No true
Centurion ever assumed anything, each standing in his real place. The
atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams. The pedant or the
conceited person silently drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while
a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher
illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical
parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser
forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the
Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained