The North before the war had been aristocratic in its intellectual life, just as the South had been aristocratic in its social régime. Literature and oratory and scholarship had been accomplishments of the few. J. G. Holland estimated in 1870 that the lecturers in the widespread lyceum system when it was at its highest point, "those men who made the platform popular and useful and apparently indispensable, did not number more than twenty-five." The whole New England period was dominated by a handful of men. The Saturday Club, which contained the most of them, had, according to Barrett Wendell, twenty-six members "all typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance." Howells characterizes it as a "real aristocracy of intellect. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest." It is significant that these were all Harvard men. The period was dominated by college men. In addition to the names mentioned by Howells, there might be added from the New England colleges, Webster, Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Parker, Clarke, Phillips, Sumner, Thoreau, Parsons, and Hale. Excepting Poe, who for a time was a student at the University of Virginia and at West Point, and Whittier, who was self-educated, and two women, Margaret Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, who lived in the period when colleges were open only for men, the list contains all the leading authors of the mid-period in America. With few exceptions these names come from what Holmes denominates "the Brahmin caste of New England," a term which he uses to distinguish them from what he called "the homespun class"--"a few chosen families against the great multitude." "Their family names are always on some college catalogue or other." From 1830 to 1870 the creation of literature was very little in the hands of the masses; it was in the hands of these scholars, of this small and provincial "aristocracy of intellect." Holmes, who gloried in the fact that he lived in Boston, "the hub of the universe," on Beacon Street, "the sunny street that holds the sifted few," may be taken as a type of this aristocracy. It was a period of the limited circle of producers, and of mutual admiration within the circumference of that circle. Each member of the group took himself with great seriousness and was taken at his own valuation by the others. When the new democratic, after-the-war America, in the person of Mark Twain, came into the circle and in the true Western style made free with sacred personalities, he was received with frozen silence.