The Thursday Lecture, which was the special clerical and social occasion of his time, he finds abolished; and he observes that the Thursday Evening Club is now a characteristic feature of Boston. This was formed for social, scientific, and literary objects. Among its founders and early members were Edward Everett, a member of First Church, and Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, the distinguished descendant and representative of the Winthrop family. The one referred to in this interview as the then leader of the Club was its late President, William B. Rogers. He was a man of superior scientific attainments, with a power of apt expression and a felicity and fluency of utterance indeed remarkable. By his efforts and influence the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was established,--a lasting monument of his zeal for technical science, the most needed factor in popular education. In making an address to the Institute at its Commencement exercises, May 30, 1882, he was struck with death; he left the very place of his heart's and life's devotion for the spirit land of Winthrop. His predecessors in the office of President of the Club were John C. Warren, the nephew of General Joseph Warren, Edward Everett, J. Mason Warren, and Bishop Manton Eastburn. The historic mantle of the office has now been cast on Colonel Theodore Lyman, upon whose well-stored and lofty head honors have fallen thick, but no faster than merited. Josiah Quincy the elder, the second on the roll of Boston's distinguished Mayors, declared that the City might well adopt Winthrop as its patron saint. His was an ideal, saintly life, and his character, in a sense, supernatural. He bore success and defeat in a political election with like equanimity, a trait that, as it were, by a law of heredity marks with special honor his living representative. Whether in office or out, and possessing large estates or, one after another, deprived of them, he kept his mind active and his brain industriously working for the development of a higher social life under Christian culture in a virgin land, by his leadership, under the Providence he devoutly acknowledged, to be fitted and fashioned for a new and powerful country, of which Boston was to be a memorable city. Nor could he fail to remark upon the location of the statue set up in his honor in Scollay Square, rather than on Boston Common, which he had laid out and secured to posterity. The City Square in Charlestown, where he first unrolled the old charter of the Colony before the new government at its first meeting here, would have been a better site for it than the one selected.