THE LITERARY CLUB

Ever since shortly after the invention of Eve, man, mere man, has shown a pertinacious and enterprising gregariousness aptly exemplified by a chronic tendency to associate himself with others of his gender in seeking a rendezvous away from home and hearth where according to an old definition “women cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” He has, in a word, on the slenderest of pretexts, taken refuge in a club of one sort or another.

In No. 9 of the Spectator, a literary enterprise which as the reader of No. 1 well knew was “laid and concerted in a club” and which owed so largely its atmosphere and its dramatic personae to the club life flowering in the English coffee houses of the time, Joseph Addison noted that man is a “sociable animal” and went on to observe, as an instance of this that

“we take all occasions and pretenses of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies, which are commonly known by the name of clubs. When a set of men find themselves agreed in any particular though never so trivial, they establish themselves into a fraternity, and meet once or twice a week upon the account of such a fantastic resemblance.”

Illustratively, he told in that paper of the fat man’s club in a certain market town with a club room which had two entrances, one through a door of normal size and the other through a pair of large folding doors. If a candidate for membership could get through the first door, he failed to qualify, but if he got stuck in that passage, the folding doors were promptly thrown open to him and he was warmly welcomed as a worthy and ample member.

In the same essay, Addison quoted verbatim ad litteratim the rules of the Two Penny Club, informing the credulous that he had observed these on the wall of an old ale house.

Rule III, a disciplinary measure with ameliorating exceptions, provided that

“If any member absents himself, he shall forfeit a penny for the use of the Club, unless in case of sickness or imprisonment.”

Rule VIII enunciated an exceedingly salutary principle, that is to say that

“If any member’s wife comes to fetch him home from the club, she shall speak to him without the door.”

Rule XI reflects somewhat upon the originality of our late fellow townsman, Paul Harris, the attorney-at-law who thought up Rotary. It ordained that

“None shall be admitted into the club who is of the same trade with any member of it.”

Although clubs in some guise have doubtless existed form the earliest times as a natural concomitant of civilization’s halting march, the English word “club” in the sense pertinent here is linguistically modern and first came into general use about the middle of the Seventeenth Century, although Ben Johnson, of whom more anon, appears to have used the word once or twice in much that sense.

In 1755 in the first edition of his Dictionary, Sam Johnson, a practicing clubman of the first water, happily defined the word to mean

“An assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions.”

and almost a century before John Aubrey had written that

“We now use the word clubbe for a sodality in a tavern.”

Clubs of the past and present are numberless and varied beyond all reckoning or summation, but I treat here only of the literary club and that in a generic sense to the end that we may now take thought and thus realize that our own beloved club, even though “sui generis” and inimitable and unparalleled in recorded time, nonetheless bears the unmistakable imprint of history and can trace its rudiments to ‘way back when.

In the Golden Age of Pericles, orators, scholars and poets and others who were willing to be so regarded, recited their compositions in the presence of self-sacrificing friends in the Temple of Athens, as others of their kind were to do centuries later in a more public way in the Athenaeum at Rome built by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 A.D.

There were all sorts of clubs in ancient Athens and the Greek word Symposium, now so respected a bit of nomenclature, originally denoted a postprandial drinking bout of varying intensity frequently brightened by flute-girls, dancers and acrobats and perhaps on occasion by a war contractor or two. But some of these ancient evenings were given over in the main to orderly and enlightened conversation among the educated led by a Symposiarch or Chairman elected with a throw of the dice. We know through the Symposium of Plato and that of Xenophon as well of the famed gatherings of this character in which Socrates was the bright, particular star.

Lyourgus, the fascistic Lacedaemonian law giver, ordained that the male population of Sparta should eat at common tables, but within the limits of that injunction these hardy Greeks tended to dine and discourse with those whom they really liked. Out of this developed those Spartan eating societies of about fifteen members each of which Plutarch tells so interestingly and which in the matter of admissions to the fold, if in no other, contributed somewhat to our own hallowed tradition.

The acceptability of one who sought to join such a society was tested in this fashion. Each member present made a little ball of soft bread and tossed it into a deep basin borne upon a waiter’s head. Those who favored the applicant dropped symmetrically round bread balls into the basin, but a member who felt contrarywise pressed his pellet flat between his fingers to signify as much, and one flattened bread fall in the basin was enough to bar the admission of the most aspiring candidate.

Cicero in his “De Senectute” represented Cato as saying so far back as 200 B.C. that he had always remained a member of a club; that clubs were established in his quaestorship and that he used to dine with the members of his club at their feasts and on the whole with moderation.

Cato asserted, we are told, that the intellectual pleasures of these meetings delighted him more than the physical and commended the Roman forefathers for calling the reclining of friends at feasts a “convivium” because it implied a communion of life and enjoyment which he thought better than the designation of the Greeks who called it sometimes a “drinking together” (that is, the symposium) and sometimes an “eating together,” so as to exalt that of least value in those groups above that which gave them their principal charm. In short, Cato was obviously trying to play down the Fish and Chips aspect.

In the same No. 9 of the Spectator Addison alluded to an old Roman club mentioned by Justus Lipsius as having a regular organization and rules of its own, but by far the most delightful and unauthentic account of an ancient club which I have come upon is that of the “Rome Literary Club” published by the Chicago Literary Club in 1916, the author being the amiable, eminent and otherwise reliable historian, Payson Sibley Wild. I was happy to be reminded through him of something I had well nigh forgotten, that that reputable and well conceived club had been incorporated under the laws of Alexandria which were at the time more favorable to corporations not for profit than the Roman laws.

The old English poet, Hoccleve, has given us a delightful though fleeting glimpse of a club in the England of Henry IV., of which Chaucer was probably a member, and which met every Thursday in the Middle Temple and was called “La Court de Bone Compaignie.” After alluding to the club’s precarious finances in a quaint ballad addressed to the Lord Chancellor and tactfully requesting him to pay his score, he gives his lordship due notice that he is to preside at the next meeting, informing him by the way that the steward has reported that he is

“for the dyner arrange

Ageyn Thirsday next, and hat is delays.”

So much for the Court of Good Company, but the sort of club of which I treat is really of later English origin and to Sir Walter Raleigh traditionally goes the honor of founding near the opening of the Seventeenth Century the first modern literary club, the Siren, which met at the sign of the Mermaid, a tavern in Bread Street, London, on the first Friday of every month.

At its meetings, poets, playwrights, noblemen, actors, lawyers, politicians and men about town drank and smoked and discussed plays and poetry. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, John Donne, Carew, Chapman, whose Homer was later to be looked into by Keats, Selden, Floria and Drayton, are reputed to have belonged at one time or another. Of this scintillating assembly said “to have combined more talent and genius than ever met together before or since,” the convivial and otherwise redoubtable Ben came to be the dominating spirit and presiding genius.

It is known that Ben Johnson helped Sir Walter with his “History of the World.” Beyond that, they both had that feeling of mutual kinship which comes only to those who have been in jail together, Ben Jonson having been a transient guest at the Tower during an early stage of Raleigh’s long imprisonment.

Keats, with fine sympathy, apostrophized thus in his “Lines to the Mermaid Tavern,”

“Souls of poets, dead and gone

What Elysium have ye known

Happy field or mossy cavern

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern.”

Sidney Lee, an eminently respectable modern authority, has written that a reasonable tradition reports that Shakespeare “was a frequent visitor at the Mermaid Tavern at the period when Ben Jonson presided over its parliament of wit,” and Fuller in his “History of English Worthies,” published in 1662, remarked in alluding to Shakespeare that “Many were the wit combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson.”

In his 101^st Epigram Ben himself pays tribute to the Mermaid in this fashion:

“But that which most doth take mine muse and me,

Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine,

Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mind.”

However, the most particular identification of the literary club which gathered at the Mermaid Tavern comes from Thomas Coryate, who in a curious and remarkable travel book published in 1611 and called “Coryate’s Cruidities Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months Travels,” gives a colorful account of his then recently completed European tour, mostly pedestrian, an aspect fittingly memorialized by a woodcut on a preliminary leaf depicting the writer’s pudgy well worn shoes linked with a laurel wreath. This odd book is introduced by an imposing constellation of verses from the pens of Ben Jonson and about sixty other posts and rhymesters in fulsome mock-heroic eulogy of the eccentric author, a traveller whose then altogether astounding exploits depended so little on reservations.

Coryate had been a sort of buffoonlike though not unlettered court jester and pensioner in attendance upon Prince Henry, after whose death in 1612 he set out upon his last journey which took him via Constantinople, Cairo and the Levant to Agra in Eastern India where he died in 1617, the last long lap of his trip from Aleppo on having been negotiated entirely on foot in ten months at a cost of three pounds sterling.

In the year before his death, he dispatched a letter to London which bore the following address:

“To the High Seneschall of the Right Worshipfull Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen, That meets the first Fridele of Every Moneth, at the signs of the Mere-Maids in Bread-streets in London, giue these: From the Court of the Great Mogul, resident of the Towne of Asmere, in the Eastern India.”

and conveyed special greetings to Ben Jonson, John Donne and others.

To any of the uninitiate who may chance to be among us, may I say that a High Seneschall is a Recording Secretary and Treasurer, and the “Sireniacal Gentlemen” alias the “Mer-maidites” were the then members of the club known as the “Siren” reputed to have been founded by Sir Walter Raleigh at the turn of the century.

In his later years, Ben Jonson presided over another notable literary club, the Apollo, at the Devil Tavern, between Middle Temple Gate and Temple Bar, for which he wrote in Latin the rules called “Leges Conviviales” which were posted over the mantel in letters of gold in an upper room adorned with a bust of Apollo, where Jonson presided in a raised chair. The members included Herrick, Suckling and other younger poets and writers known as the “Sons of Ben.” Those who were admitted to this select coterie and sat at the feet of the master were said to have been “sealed of the Tribe of Ben.”

Although the earliest clearly recognizable English literary club had its birth in a tavern, the real impetus for English club life, literary and otherwise, came about a century and a half later through the coffee houses.

On May 10, 1637, John Evelyn noted in his Diary that he had on that day for the first time seen anyone drink coffee. The earliest English coffee house was established in 1650 at Oxford and the first in London in 1652 by an English merchant in the Turkish trade, who set up Pasqua Rosee, a youth from Smyrna, as a coffee house keeper in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill. The enterprise was an immediate success and when Evelyn made the last entry in his Diary near the end of the century there were probably no less than three thousand coffee houses in London alone.

Many frequenters of these fertile and attractive breeding grounds for conversation, news and propaganda, made appointments at their favorite coffee house and used it for an address. Particular coffee houses attracted groups with common interests.

From the standpoint of literary associations, Will’s Coffee House is the most noted. Dryden first made it the resort of poets and wits and presided at their gatherings for nearly forty years before his death in 1700.

On February 3, 1663-4, Samuel Pepys made this entry in his diary:

“In Convent Garden tonight, going to fetch home my wife, I stopped at the great Coffee-house there, where I never was before; where Dryden the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had time then, or could at other times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse. But I could not tarry, and as it was late, they were all ready to go away.”

Robert J. Allen in his fairly current book “The Clubs of Augustan London” observes that the history of the literary club of the late Seventeenth Century is the history of the club of wits at Will’s Coffee House.

During the later years in which Dryden held away at Will’s, he had there, as he put it, both his winter and summer seat – one by the fireside, and the other at the corner of the balcony. Addison and Steele and Mat Prior met there with him near the end of his reign and young Alexander Pope, as a boy of twelve, was taken there to see the great man.

As Dryden ruled at Will’s, so later did Addison at Button’s Coffee House, where he, as Pope acidly put it,

“Like Cato gives his little Senate laws and sits attentive to his own applause.”

Another significant literary group is the Scriblerus Club founded in 1714 with the avowed purpose of holding false and pedantic learning up to ridicule. Swift, Pope, Gay, Parnell and Dr. Arbuthnot were the chief among its members who met informally as intimate friends to discuss their literary work, their publishing plans and their enemies who were always in supply. Under the partial anonymity of the pseudonym Martin Scriblerus, this famed literary clinic put out a number of pungently satiric pieces of lively contemporary interest but no longer read.

In the age of Samuel Johnson, the literary custom which had belonged successively to Will’s and Button’s passed to the Bedford Coffee House frequented by Fielding, Hogarth and Goldsmith.

Dr. Johnson is prominently identified with the formation of several clubs with a literary background, including the Ivy Lane which for some years beginning in 1749 met weekly at the King’s Head, a famous beef-steak house, and of which Sir John Hawkins, one of his earliest biographers, was a member, and the Essex Club which Johnson formed in his declining years and which met three times a week, twice at the Essex Head Tavern and once at his home, and for which he wrote a set of rules after the manner of Addison and Ben Jonson.

As Ben Jonson had been so was Samuel Johnson a frequenter of the Devil Tavern which was located near St. Dunstan’s Church and derived its name from a sign which depicted St. Dunstan pulling the Devil’s nose with a pair of tongs. Here, according to biographer Hawkins, the Ivy Lane Club, at Dr. Johnson’s suggestion, celebrated the birth of a Mrs. Lennox’s “first literary child.” In the course of festivities which lasted till dawn, Johnson crowned the lady with a laurel wreath and the night passed, we are told, in pleasant conversations and harmless mirth. Hawkins reported that at about five in the morning “Johnson’s face shown with meridian splendour, though his drink had been only lemonade.”

We come next to what must be the most remarkable of all literary clubs now in the one hundred and eighty-fourth year of its existence and founded in 1764 by Dr. Johnson and others at the suggestion of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Although popularly known as the Literary Club, it has from the beginning been to its members simply “The Club,” a name put forward for our own club in 1876 but rejected as was also, wisely enough, this longer version considered at the same fateful meeting, that is,

“The Club for the Aggregation and Fostering of Old Citizens Regardless of Qualification.”

At the outset, The Club met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, every Monday evening at seven. The original members were nine (soon to become ten), including Johnson, Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith and Sir John Hawkins. Boswell, although he had recently met Johnson for the first time and did more than any one else to perpetuate its fame, was not admitted to The Club until ten years later when the membership was thirty-five and gathered fortnightly during the meetings of Parliament. Since 1780 the number of members has been strictly limited to forty. Among others who came in during Dr. Johnson’s lifetime were Gibbon, Adam Smith, Dr. Burney, the father of Fanny Burney, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and David Garrick.

The Club which has been described in this century as the most exclusive institution in Europe was from the beginning chary of new members. On hearing Sir Joshua Reynolds speak of it shortly after its formation, David Garrick remarked:

“I like it much, I think I shall be of you.”

When this reached Johnson’s ears he was deeply offended and roared:

“He’ll be of use, how does he know we will permit him. The First Duke in England has no right to hold such language.”

but Garrick made his peace, was admitted and conducted himself to agreeably that Johnson was later to observe that his death in 1779 had “eclipsed the gaiety of nations.”

Adam Smith was elected in 1775, a year before the “Wealth of Nations” was put on sale at all leading booksellers, whereupon Boswell wrote to a friend saying,

“Smith, too, is one of our Club. It has lost its select merit.”

A single black ball sufficed to exclude a candidate and in 1790 Boswell said in a letter to another member,

“I was sorely mortified at The Club on Tuesday (December 14) when I was in the Chair, and on opening the box found three balls against General Burgoyne.”

That action is said to have caused no unrest whatever on this side of the Atlantic.

Although, as might have been expected of any company kept by Dr. Johnson, conversation was its dominant activity, there is meager but incontestable evidence that on occasion the members of The Club sat back and listened to the reading of a literary production by one of their number.

At a meeting of The Club in January, 1773, Oliver Goldsmith read a play entitled, “The Old House, A New Inn,” later produced by George Colman, also a member, in Covent Garden on March fifteenth of that year under the title which we know so well, “She Stoops to Conquer or The Mistakes of a Night,” where it proved an immediate success as it has ever since continued to be.

From Shakespeare to the late Victorians, there are only three English plays that really live, that you or I are apt to see or read in ordinary course, and it is quite worthy of remark that all three were written within the space of five years by members of The Club, the one just mentioned by Oliver Goldsmith and the “Rivals” and the “School or Scandal” by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the greatest wit of his day and one of the great orators of all time.

There is pretty good evidence that at a meeting in 1779 Dr. Percy, the editor of the “Reliques of English Poetry” entertained the members with a long ballad of his own composition. Years later he wrote in a brief memorandum history of The Club that it

“* * at first consisted of only ten members, who, it was intended, should be men of such talents that if only two of them should meet for the evening they should be able to entertain each other.”

But foresight can never be wholly adequate to its ends. In December, 1825 Lord Liverpool, a member then nearing the end of his term as Prime Minister, dined alone at a regularly scheduled meeting and reported for the record that he had consumed but a single bottle of The Club’s Madeira. Even that was not the worse. At the meeting called for August 2, 1785, no one dined.

Ladies’ Nights appear to have been a recognized feature during the earliest years of The Club.

Hawkins in the “Life” said:

“A lady distinguished by her beauty and taste for literature invited us two successive years to a dinner at her house. Curiosity was her motive and possibly a desire of intermingling with out conversation the charm of her own. She effected to consider us a set of literary men, and perhaps gave the first occasion for distinguishing the Society by the name of the Literary Club, a distinction which it never assumed itself.”

The lady was Mrs. Elizabeth Montague, the most famous hostess of those eighteenth century Blue Stocking societies which served so pleasingly to narrow the gap between the world of letters and the world of fashion. In the following decade Mrs. Vesey, a Blue Stocking hostess, second only to her friend and rival, Mrs. Montague, whose husband, Agmondecham Vesey, had been admitted to The Club in the meantime, regularly gave parties of exceptional charm and brilliance on the evenings when its members dined together, and, as was said, came on to her afterwards.

Apparently no minutes were kept until the meeting of April 7, 1775, when, among others, Boswell, Gibbon, Johnson, Dr. Percy and Sir Joshua Reynolds were on hand. Edmund Burke was one of those who incurred fines for being absent.

Beginning on January 22, 1779, a careful record was kept not of the wine consumed but of that which was left and at a meeting on Tuesday, May 23, 1786, Mr. Edmund Malone, the great Shakespearean editor and the first treasurer of The Club, was instructed to procure a hogshead of claret from Ireland to be paid for by Lord Eliot, the newest member.

Twenty-two members of The Club attended Dr. Johnson’s funeral in 1784 of whom six were his pallbearers. At a meeting on December 23, 1788, it was resolved that a monument be erected to the memory of the late Dr. Johnson in Westminster Abbey, and the members agreed to contribute five guineas each and to try to get other contributions.

A modern historian of The Club has pointed out that its affairs have throughout been regulated largely by a secretary who is called the treasurer and that there were only eleven treasurers during the first century and a half of its existence.

The Club has had its financial problems from time to time as is the way of clubs. On June 22, 1841, the resigning treasurer paid over a balance of L12. 18s. 9d. to the new treasurer, the Reverend H. Hart Milman, the eminent classical scholar, whose incumbency was not without risk for on February 6, 1856, the funds in his hands amounted to less than nothing and he was constrained to report that The Club owed him L2 11s. He was thereupon directed to collect one pound from each of the thirty-eight members.

Sir Walter Scott became a member in 1818 to be followed later by Lord MacCaulay, Lord Tennyson, Sir Henry Maine, Arthur Hallam, Matthew Arnold, Gladstone, Viscount Bryce and Rudyard Kipling, who failed of election in 1914 but came in shortly afterwards.

Just after his election on April 9, 1839, MacCaulay made this note in his diary:

“I went to the Thatched House and was well pleased to meet The Club for the first time. * * I was amazed in turning over the records * * to come across poor Bozzy’s signature evidently affixed when he was too drunk to hold a pen.”

and in writing elsewhere of The Club in the era of Johnson and Boswell MacCaulay observed that

“It gradually became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known all over London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk man and the pastry cook.”

Even so, it may well be doubted that the judgments of The Club could ever have been one-half so potent as are those of the Book-of-the Month Club in our own era.

In the first one hundred fifty years of its existence the total number of members of The Club was 233, including nine prime ministers (not counting Winston Churchill who came in later), and of those who had died before its publication, the Dictionary of National Biography contains the lives of all but eight. Whether the eight constitute an oversight on the part of the editors or The Club is a matter for conjecture.

The subtitle of the Annals of The Club, a history published in 1914, is “esto Perpetua.” So it was from the beginning, for Hawkins says in his life of Johnson that

“our evening toast was ‘esto perpetua.’”

The Club appears to be complying thus far with its own self-imposed injunction to live forever.

There is in London today another club, founded forty-two years later than The Club, know as The Literary Society, of which Wordsworth and Edward Fitzgerald were original members and to which Washington Irving once belonged. The Literary Society and The Club have about the same number of members and have had many in common, and in both, as has been the practice of The Club from the very beginning, each member takes his turn at presiding, but there is this vital distinction – in the Literary Society the Secretary is known as the Secretary.

In a correct tradition the name Athenaeum has graced many literary groups, of which one, at first though briefly known as The Society, was founded in London in 1824 by Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and others. Later members have been Dickens, Thackeray, MacCaulay, Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Wellington, Lord Lytton, Charles Darwin, Farraday and Herbert Spencer, not to overlook our old friend Lord Liverpool and a goodly number of other Prime Ministers, including Disraeli, whose father Isaac was one of the founders.

The Athenaeum has been called the foremost modern literary club in England and the most important literary, artistic and scientific club in the world. But it differs markedly from the nomadic literary club of familiar genre, because, with a membership running into four figures, it has been, almost from the beginning, domiciled in its own building which houses the greatest club library in the world, one corner of which – the library, not the world – is named after MacCaulay, the corner where he used to sit among the English history books, and there is a table in another corner at which Thackeray constantly worked. At the bottom of the front staircase the spot is pointed out to visitors where Dickens and Thackeray shook hands to end their unfortunate estrangement just a week before the latter’s death.

Perhaps the following verse by Theodore Hook, an early and amusing member, may convey something to you,

“There’s first the Athenaeum Club,

so wise there’s not a man of it

That has not sense enough for six

(in fact that’s the plan of it)

The very waiters answer you with

eloquence Socratical

And always place the knives and forks

in order mathematical.

Despite its remarkably interesting literary associations, this club today might call to mind these words written of another by Anthony Trollope, a former member of the Athenaeum, in the Prime Minister,

“The Club went on its way like other Clubs and men dined and smoked and played billiards and pretended to read.”

And then crossing over to this side, we find right here in this mighty metropolitan center which during its halcyon days at least pumped more fresh water than any other municipality on earth, the Chicago Literary Club, and down in little old New York there is the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club of which Heywood Broun was a founder and of which F.P.A. claims to have been for many years the paying teller. Adams has admitted somewhere that its name was filched in part from the more widely known ladies literary society of Gopher Prairie, the Thanatopsis Club.

Of the innumerable literary clubs and societies throughout this land, there have been some with comparable activities and bearing a not too remote resemblance to our own. For example, the Indianapolis Literary Club founded just seventy years ago which meets every Monday evening from October first to the end of May for exercises such as ours, with a varied membership limited to one hundred and fifty which has included President Benjamin Harrison, James Whitcomb Riley, Lew Wallace, Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson and Albert J. Beveridge; the Literary Club of Cincinnati which is mentioned in our own recently published history and will celebrate its one hundredth anniversary this very month; The Club of Rochester, N.Y.; the Mermaid Club of Germantown, in Philadelphia, which peacefully expired about a quarter of a century ago; S.L.K., the Society for Literary Knowledge, a very small sixty year old group in New York City; the Literary Society of Washington, D.C., about as old as our own club – but co-educational – and of which Helen Nicolay, whose father was of the well known Lincolnian firm of Hay and Nicolay, is the historian, and the Madison (Wisconsin) Literary Club, also co-educational and still very much alive at the age of three score and ten. As it may to any club, death came long since to the New York Athenaeum founded in the same year as the Athenaeum of London and before which Bryant delivered four lectures on “Poetry” in the following year.

But by far the most significant and important literary club in that portion of North America which lies East of Michigan Boulevard has been the Saturday Club of Boston founded about 1856.

Horatio Woodman, not to be confused with the one who spared the tree (as I have always liked to and do believe), an unwed member of the bar who functioned as the High Seneschall, was undoubtedly the moving force as was Ralph Waldo Emerson the moving spirit in its organization. The club met and dined at three in the afternoon on the last Saturday of the month in a room on the second floor of the Parker House in Boston.

Among the original members were James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Louis Agassiz. Longfellow and Dr. Holmes joined in 1857 to make fourteen members in all, including four poets of whom one was also a physician, one historian, one essayist, one biologist, one mathematician and astronomer, one classical scholar, one music critic, one banker, one judge and two lawyers. Hawthorne and Whittier came in within the next two years as did Prescott just prior to his death in 1859. The club expanded rapidly to include in later years such notables as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Dean Howells, Henry James, John Fiske, President Eliot of Harvard, Mr. Justice Holmes, Charles Francis Adams and Charles Sumner, as well as, for good measure, a Governor of Massachusetts.

It is plain then that the Saturday Club had in its hey-day a membership roll matched by few clubs in history and by none in America. Although the losses from this roll have been incalculably severe, the Club is still very much in existence. With a membership of about thirty, it meets on the last Saturday of the month from September to June at the Union Club in Boston. A letter received from one of its members and chroniclers within the week states that the club “tries as best it can, mutatis mutandis, to carry on the traditions of earlier years.”

The Saturday Club celebrated the Bobby Burns centennial in 1859 for which occasion Holmes, Lowell and Whittier wrote poems and Emerson spoke. Five years later it commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth when Holmes read a poem and Emerson spoke again.

Emerson had invited William Cullen Bryant to attend the Shakespearean function but Bryant missed this as he did the celebration of his own eightieth anniversary by the Chicago Literary Club on November 3, 1874 at a dinner in the old Sherman House where it then had its club rooms, although at the latter event he was most interestingly represented by his two brothers, Arthur and John Howard, both dirt farmers then living near Princeton, Illinois, as were their two other brothers Austin and Cyrus.

John Bigelow, one of the poet’s biographers, says in speaking of the Chicago Literary Club Dinner that,

“the Bryant brothers entertained the company with many reminiscences of the youth of their illustrious brother, from whom an amusing letter was received.”

Arthur Bryant founded a nursery at Princeton, now operated by his grandson.

Although farming was his chief occupation, John Howard Bryant, who spent seventy-one years in Illinois and died in 1902 at the age of ninety-five, was a foremost leader in his community who in his time built roads and bridges, made brick, edited a newspaper, served in the Illinois legislature and as a collector of internal revenue for his district, and published two books of poems, one in 1855 and the other in 1894. In pre-Civil War days he was a strong supporter of abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, for many years a Congregationalist pastor at Princeton, and his farm home became for a period a busy station on the underground railroad. A rail splitter in his own right, he was a delegate to the Republican Convention at Chicago which nominated his good friend, Abraham Lincoln, for the presidency.

The four brothers of William Cullen Bryant all came to Illinois in 1832 and took up adjoining homesteads. His mother spent the last few years of her life at Princeton where she is buried in the Bryant family lot.

But I digress. The Saturday Club too was primarily devoted to conversation, with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes as by all odds the most brilliant talker in the group. Although never so ponderous, he was in this regard a transatlantic equivalent of Doctor Johnson.

It was Holmes who referred to the Parker House as the Will’s Coffee House of Boston and regretted that the Saturday Club had no Boswell to record its golden hours. His own biographer, John T. Morse, Jr., has written that

“Outside the sacred penetralia which were shut within his own front door, nothing else in Dr. Holmes life gave him so much pleasure as did this club. He loved it. He hugged the thought of

it.”

Morse also observed that Holmes never could write as well as he talked which may bring Dr. Johnson to mind. Edmund Gosse, the English litterateur who had locked in on the Saturday Club, remarked of Holmes that,

“Perhaps no man of modern times has given his contemporaries a more extraordinary impression of wit in conversation.”

Emerson, though less socially inclined, was almost equally devoted to the Saturday Club. But on one of his frequent tours to the hinterland he delivered a talk on “Clubs” which a Milwaukee newspaper reported to have been as poor a lecture as he was able to give, thereby setting a dangerous if not binding precedent.

The historian of the Literary Club of Cincinnati in writing of its mid-nineteenth century beginnings recalls that

“We were great sticklers for the club rules in those callow days, and had among us a few of those litigious fellows * * who fancied that our temporal and eternal welfare depended upon the constitution and by-laws.”

Emerson in conveying to a fellow member of the Saturday Club some rather detailed and imperative instructions as to a club project observed tersely and apologetically that

“Club law is cruel.”

But Doctor Holmes was never the legalist that his son turned out to be and in referring to the Saturday Club in his “Life of Emerson” he remarked that:

“The vitality of this club has depended on its utter poverty in statutes and by-laws.”

Perhaps you may have already distinguished in your own minds between the Chicago Literary Club and several of the other famous literary clubs I have mentioned in that for the most part, though with truly notable exceptions, we, the members of our club, have had no difficulty whatever in preserving our amateur standing.

However, with the passing years such clubs as Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club, the London Literary Society and the Saturday Club of Holmes and Emerson have tended more and more toward a lay membership as varied and cosmopolitan as or own. Moreover, their activities have come to be almost entirely social, while ours remain what you know them to be.

As for The Chicago Literary Club, it would be well nigh a desecration as well as a brave and a bold presumption for me to seek by one jot or tittle to add to or detract from its wholly delightful story as told in the new history which reached your eager hands last June.

In this slight, casual and haphazard excursion into the annals of literary clubs, I have naturally had occasion to read the histories of many such, but to my mind none can compare with Wild’s as to either content or format.

His felicitous and delectable book, “The Chicago Literary Club,” published in this year of grace, is also our book. A labor of loyalty and love on his part, it is the prized, precious and cherished possession of each of us, an opulent treasury in which are stored luminous memories of choice spirits and gracious evenings to brighten the path we treat in quest of the joys ahead, recording admirable and urbanely as it does not only the deeds and doings but the lights and shadows and the genial and humane nuances of our fleeing past.

Cherished it is for its charming perpetuation of a priceless tradition and as a mirror-like manifestation of the inimitable and uniquely engaging personality of Payson Sibley Wild, our guiding genius and scintillating lodestar for lo these many years, cherished too for its capture and preservation of the essential and the enduring and endearing qualities and the pervading spirit of The Chicago Literary Club which have contributed so happily to leaven, enrich and orient our more or less cluttered lives.

Mr. Wild, we glory in The Book; after the fashion of Dr. Holmes, we hug the thought of it. We thank you. To you and to The Chicago Literary Club may I say at this the end.

“Esto Perpetua.”