could not disown, in
spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
may be the secret of Boston.

II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
that, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone," the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
t