“I remember his getting up at a dinner of the Saturday Club on the Shakspeare anniversary in 1864, to which some guests had been invited, looking about him tranquilly for a minute or two, and then sitting down; serene and unabashed, but unable to say a word upon a subject so familiar to his thoughts from boyhood.” Yet on the manuscript of this address Mr. Emerson noted that it was read at the Club’s celebration on that occasion, and at the Revere House. (“Parker’s” was the usual gathering-place of the Club.) The handwriting of this note shows that Mr. Emerson wrote it in his later years, so it is very possible that Mr. Cabot was right. Mr. Emerson perhaps forgot to bring his notes with him to the dinner, and so did not venture to speak. And the dinner may have been at “Parker’s.” ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT The Boston Society of Natural History celebrated the One Hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Humboldt. Dr. Robert C. Waterston presided at the Music Hall, where Agassiz made the address. In the evening there was a reception in Horticultural Hall. The occasion was made memorable by the Society by the founding of a Humboldt and Agassiz scholarship in the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy in Cambridge. Poems by Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Howe were read. Professor E. J. Young and Dr. Charles T. Jackson gave reminiscences of Humboldt; Colonel Higginson, the Rev. Dr. Hedge and others spoke. Mr. Emerson’s remarks are taken from an abstract given in the account of the celebration published by the Society. WALTER SCOTT Although Mr. Emerson, in the period between 1838 and 1848 especially, when considering the higher powers of poetry, spoke slightingly of Scott,—in the _Dial_ papers as “objective” and “the poet of society, of patrician and conventional Europe,” or in _English Traits_ as a writer of “a rhymed travellers’ guide to Scotland,”—he had always honor for the noble man, and affectionate remembrance for the poems as well as the novels. In the poem “The Harp,” when enumerating poets, he calls Scott “the delight of generous boys,” but the _generosus puer_ was his own delight; the hope of the generation lay in him, and his own best audience was made up of such. In the essay “Illusions,” he says that the boy “has no better friend than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch and Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real?” In the essay “Aristocracy,” he names among the claims of a superior class, “Genius, the power to affect the Imagination,” and presently speaks of “those who think and paint and laugh and weep in their eloquent closets, and then convert the world into a huge whispering-gallery, to report the tale to all men and win smiles and tears from many generations,” and gives Scott and Burns among the high company whom he instances.