our authors. The
country at large has sometimes been annoyed at the self-consciousness of
New England, at the atmosphere of clique, of mutual admiration, of
isolation, in which all her scholars, except Emerson, have lived, and
which notably enveloped the last little distinguished group of them. The
circumstances which led to the isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow,
and the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. The ravages of the war
carried off the poets, scholars, and philosophers of the generation
which immediately followed these men, and by destroying their natural
successors left them standing magnified beyond their natural size, like
a grove of trees left by a fire. The war did more than kill off a
generation of scholars who would have succeeded these older scholars. It
emptied the universities by calling all the survivors into the field of
practical life; and after the war ensued a period during which all the
learning of the land was lodged in the heads of these older worthies who
had made their mark long before. A certain complacency which piqued the
country at large was seen in these men. An ante-bellum colonial posing,
inevitable in their own day, survived with them. When Jared Sparks put
Washington in the proper attitude for greatness by correcting his
spelling, Sparks was in cue with the times. It was thought that a great
man must have his hat handed to him by his biographer, and be ushered on
with decency toward posterity. In the lives and letters of some of our
recent public men there has been a reminiscence of this posing, which we
condemn as absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. Provincial
manners are always a little formal, and the pomposity of the colonial
governor was never quite worked out of our literary men.

Let us not disparage the past. We are all grateful for the New England
culture, and especially for the little group of men in Cambridge and
Boston who did their best according to the light of their day. Their
purpose and taste did all that high ideals and good taste can do, and no
more eminent literati have lived during this century. They gave the
country songs, narrative poems, odes, epigrams, essays, novels. They
chose their models well, and drew their materials from decent and likely
sources. They lived stainless lives, and died in their professors'
chairs honored by all men. For achievements of this sort we need hardly
use as strong language as Emerson does in describing con