The idea of a national university of music--sneered at and scouted when a few enthusiasts first talked and dreamed of it--took shape in 1867 in the now famous New England Conservatory of Music, founded by Eben Tourjée. It is a magnificent school in a magnificent home--the old St. James' Hotel on Franklin Square--with a hundred teachers from the very foremost rank of their profession. The conservatory has possibly done more for New England culture than any other influence save Harvard University. The literary life of Boston needs neither chronicler nor comment. Such men as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, Prescott, the historian, Longfellow, Lowell and countless others who, living, have made the city their home, or, dead, sleep in its chambers of Peace, have cast a glamour of books and bookmen and book-life around her until her title of "The Athens of America" has passed from jest to earnest. The earliest newspaper in America was the Boston _News Letter_; and to-day its many newspapers maintain the highest standard of "up-to-date" journalism in the dignified, not the degrading sense of the word. Boston is indeed a "bookworm's paradise," with its splendid free lending library and low-priced book-stores, making access to the best authors possible to the poorest. The _Atlantic Monthly_, which for so many years has occupied a place unique and unapproachable among American magazines, is published here. Art is represented by the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts, with its beautiful exterior and interior decorations and fine collection of antiques and art objects; the Art Club, the Sketch and the Paint and Clay clubs, as well as by the innumerable paintings and statues appearing in public places; by the Athenæum, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Boston Society of Natural History, the Warren Museum and the Lowell Institute free lectures.