Some of these things were not actually uttered at the Club, but they pretty accurately represented its conversation. An abridgment would have to be almost as long as the book to do full justice to its wealth of material; it would have to repeat countless literary incidents: such as the fact that Lowell for a long time tried to find out something of Forceythe Willson, only to discover him living in Cambridge within two hundred yards of Elmwood; that E. J. Reed, the Chief Constructor of the British Navy, thought Longfellow had written “the finest poem on shipbuilding that ever was or probably ever will be written”; and that one of the members said Emerson’s “good word about a man’s character is like being knighted on the field of battle.” No one, indeed, emerges from the history in such noble proportions or in such an agreeable light as Emerson. Nor is this due to any partiality of his son. The truth plainly appears that even in the company of Agassiz and Hoar and Holmes and James and Lowell and Norton, Emerson was the spiritual master of the Club. Sumner, on the other hand, though heartily praised in a good many pages, simply refuses to seem attractive. He had the vices of manner for which Boston is too famous—its egotism, its insolence, its complacency. The early history of the Saturday Club goes far toward proving that fame unjust. Its members at least can be called inhuman only in the sense that they were honourable, conscientious, busy, temperate, and kind much beyond the common run of men conspicuously talented. And they lacked neither mirth nor fellowship. Why are their books on the whole not as good as themselves? Did the thinness of the product of most of them come from Puritan inhibitions? The history of the Saturday Club unconsciously emphasizes a discrepancy, for the men who wrote the gentle, pure, noble, but not too rich or varied classics of New England were themselves men of pretty full blood and high hearts. THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE To what is due the fact, which can hardly be denied, that the great older magazines no longer dominate the fields of journalism and literature in the United States as they once did? Many answers may be given, and all have been given by observers of varying predilections: that the tide of proletarian vulgarity has risen; that the levels of art have fallen; that public taste demands more violent stimulants; that the non-English elements of our national composition are asserting themselves as never before; that a sharper critical temper has invaded the atmosphere; that the Bolsheviki are among us, red and raging; that our democracy has just begun to live. Each of these is but explanation from one angle. Speaking as historian, I see in that shift of leadership the end of an epoch, the period from about 1870 to 1910 which may be called the Silver Age of our literature.