and worn at forty, there was about him that same haunting appearance of perverted life which she had noticed in Professor Wolcott. Dix was arriving at the conclusion that he was a man more than usually disappointed in love, when a second storm of applause made her aware that Doctor Husted, the guest of honor on the occasion, was about to speak.

It was impossible not to listen. Miss Husted was taking Dix's heart by storm, which President Wolcott was not. Besides, there was a wonderful record back of her, and she must have something to say. Her remarks, brief and to the point and characterized by a stern wit and brilliance, melted Dix's youthful cynicism into almost girlish enthusiasm. Miss Husted's speech was cosmopolitan, like herself, taking broadest, deepest, highest views of universal subjects and bringing encouragement to her listeners. At the close she gently rallied Professor Wolcott on her modesty with regard to her book and extended, on behalf of the association and of society in general, hearty congratulations to the author of "Philanthropy Sketches."

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Latimer, rising unannounced and speaking with eager impressiveness, "you do not know, as you should, that our respected author-professor has admitted

another fact, namely, that she contemplated calling the little hero of the third sketch in the series, "The Stone Artist,' you know, or you will know when you have read the book, 'The Sculptor of the "Gabriel." The original cathedral of the story is St. Anselm's."

During another storm of applause, in which Dix heartily joined, her mind went back to many things. She remembered that the president and the "indispensable" came from the same city. They must have met. It was all plain now. What had puzzled her was explained. Dix was congratulating herself upon her brilliant discovery when Mrs. Latimer came up and said:

"You will ask President Wolcott to your tea?"

Dix, after a troubled moment, gave a hesitating consent, the manner of which Mrs. Latimer did not even notice.

During tea, Dix found that her fears were groundless. The professor and the "indispensable" had never heard of each other until that afternoon. Dix had built her romance in vain; so had Mrs. Latimer. It came out almost simultaneously that Miss Wolcott was troubled because of stupid typographical errors in her book, and that Mr. Reynolds had been engaged for three years to a lady in the South.

O

WAS recently turning the pages of a volume of pamphlets published near the beginning of the century, when my eye struck the words, "loose, lascivious Moore," occurring in a poem published in Philadelphia. "Who," I asked, "dares speak in this way of the author of 'Lalla Rookh' and the Irish Melodies? and that, too, in the City of Brotherly Love?" Immediately I came upon another, less distinguished, name:

"Columbia's genius! Dennie! deathless

name,

Blessed with a full satiety of fame!"

I now found that I had come upon a satirical poem, indicated in fact by its title, "The Philadelphia Pursuits of Literature," signed by "Juvenal Junius," not of Rome, but of New Jersey.

At his farmhouse on the banks of the Raritan, the bucolic satirist receives a packet from Philadelphia, containing the last number of the Portfolio, and, enraged at paying one dollar for carriage, resolves to review Philadelphia's "scribbling "scribbling crew," as he calls her litterateurs, and rushes full tilt against the unsuspecting Dennie:

"What though thy name has never reached the shore

That claims the birth of loose, lascivious Moore."

The satirist tells us that it has been the fashion to praise the poetry of Mr. Moore, and that one of the most accomplished ladies of Philadelphia regrets, in the columns of the Portfolio, "the fleeting summer visit of that darling child of genius, Moore."

This literary incident illustrates the political rancor of the day. In this year, 1805, Jefferson and the Democratic party were in power. Dennie was a Federalist, and it was enough for the Democratic satirist of the Raritan to know that Dennie

"Loud delights to sound the praise of Moore,

Who, God be thanked, has left Columbia's shore."

On his part, Moore, while in Philadelphia, shared with Dennie and his coterie the pleasures of their Symposia. It was to them that he addressed the passage in the "Letter to Spencer," beginning:

"Yet, yet forgive me, O ye sacred few, Whom late by Delaware's green banks I knew,

Whom, known and loved through many a social eve,

'Twas bliss to live with, and 'twas pain to leave."

He says in a note to this poem, that it was in the society of Mr. Dennie and his friends, that he passed the most agreeable moments of his tour. Some of Moore's poems appeared first in the Portfolio, among them the song beginning,

"Alone by the Schuylkill a wanderer roved."

The satirist then says of the "Lay Preacher," that his sermons are but parodies of the pulpit discourses of our divines. "They display wit, but it is of that species which a sensible man disclaims for its profaneness, and an original writer for its facility."

"What though thy works did never make a show

With other drugs in Paternoster Row;
Yet to the Yankees thou canst life impart,
Improve the mind, and rectify the heart.
Jemima oft has read thy sermons droll,
Where Merrimac and Androscoggin roll;
And there's no clown from Walpole to Hell
Gate,

But ribaldry from thee has learned to prate." To understand the allusion to Walpole and the terrible satire of Jemima reading his droll sermons on the banks of the Merrimac, I was led to trace the career of Joseph Dennie, the first professed litterateur of New Eng

land, the only man in the United States who, at the death of the Philadelphian novelist, Brockden Brown, was making a profession of literature, the first editor of a newspaper at all literary in its character, the founder of the periodical which became the first popular magazine of the country, and, we may add, the first "Bohemian" of the country. I was also led to notice the circle of bright, congenial spirits who surrounded Dennie and invoked their rustic muse upon the slender reed.

Joseph Dennie was born in Boston in 1768, of a family still honorably surviving. He came naturally by his taste for journalism and letters, for his mother was a daughter of Bartholomew Green, Jr., whose father printed the Boston News-Letter, the first newspaper published in the American colonies. Young Dennie graduated at Harvard in 1790, and immediately thereafter began the study of law in Charlestown, N. H., entering the office of Benjamin West, brother of the Rev. Dr. Samuel West, pastor of the Hollis Street Church in Boston from 1789 to 1808. His going to Charlestown was a turning point in his career, for he never thereafter lived for any length of time in Boston, and made in New Hampshire acquaintances, the influence of whose society incited him to adopt the literary life. At this time Charlestown was not surpassed in eminent men by any town in the state. It had been settled by sturdy and intelligent emigrants from Massachusetts towns on the Connecticut River, like Southampton and Deerfield; but its leading citizen was West's partner, Simeon Olcott, of Connecticut origin, a graduate of Yale, afterwards chief justice of New Hampshire and a United States senator. He was the first man to open a law office in New Hampshire west of the Merrimac River.

There were then, in 1764, no counties in the colony, and of course no shire towns or courts for the trial of causes, outside the capital, Portsmouth. The wide stretch of hilly country be

and

tween the Merrimac and the Connecticut was, nearly up to this time, a densely wooded wilderness; when the first party of two men broke through it from what is now Nashua and appeared before the astonished inhabitants of "No. 4," as Charlestown was first called, they were welcomed with as much enthusiasm as if they were Livingstone and Stanley. It was not until 1771 that Governor Wentworth divided the colony into five counties, naming them from great noblemen in England, Rockingham, Hillsborough, Strafford, Cheshire and Grafton, with county towns under judicial organization. Hitherto disputes had generally been settled out of court, as the expenses of a trial were too great except where property to a considerable amount was involved. The courts, too, were in a very unsettled state; and this fact bears particularly upon the change in Dennie's life. The judges were without salary except a fee for cases tried; and no one fitted for judicial office could afford to hold it for any length of time. The judges were not paid because the colony, burdened by the expenses of the French wars, and the defence of the frontiers from Indian depredations, could not afford it, and because it was considered that good citizens owed it to the state to serve for the honor which the position conferred. But this patriotic consideration often failed to induce persons elected by the legislature to accept a judgeship, and at times no courts whatever were held.

In the list of Charlestown's lawyers Joseph Dennie's name appears with the addition of the significant words, "a short time." It was a very short time, just long enough for him to make one appearance, before an inferior court, presided over by an unlettered judge, whom party politics had elevated from a farm to a seat on the bench, and whose legal knowledge was limited to the technical vocabulary of the profession. The story of how Dennie's first case drove him from the bar, like William Cullen

Bryant's at a later day, has been told in print by his friend Royall Tyler, and although it may have been intentionally embellished, Dennie admitted its general truthfulness.

He was to move the continuance of an action upon a promissory note, to which there was no defence. Previous continuances had left nothing for counsel to urge except the fatal effect upon his client of judgment and execution. Dennie's professional friends gathered to hear his maiden effort, and even the opposing counsel had agreed to waive objection to the motion. It may be supposed that the young barrister had arrayed himself for the occasion. He was at all times attentive to his dress, and he may have appeared then as he was seen by an acquaintance in later life, on a May morning, when he entered his editorial sanctum dressed in a peagreen coat, white vest, nankeen smallclothes, white silk stockings, and shoes (or pumps) fastened with silver buckles, which covered at least one half of the foot from the instep to the

toe.

His small-clothes were tied at the knees with ribbon of the same color in double bows, the ends reaching down to the ankles. He had just left the barber's shop. His hair, in front, was well loaded with pomatum, frizzled and powdered; the "earlocks" had undergone the same process; behind, his natural hair was augmented by the addition of a large queue (called the "false-tail") which, enrolled in some yards of black ribbon, reached halfway down his back.

Such may have been Dennie's appearance before the rustic judge; and thus dressed, bowing gracefully to the court, he began his speech in support of his motion for a continuance of the case to the next term of the court. He traced the history of compulsory payments from the time when the debtor, his wife and children, were sold into slavery to satisfy the demands of the creditor, and the corpse of the insolvent was denied the rites of burial; he showed that now by the

general softening of manners the statutes of bankruptcy and jail delivery had humanely liberated the body of the unfortunate debtor from prison, upon the surrender of his estate; he called attention to the fact that the courts by interposing the law's delay between the creditor and the ruin of the debtor had preceded the legislature in the march of humanity; and he predicted, what has actually come to pass, that the legislature would repeal the statutes which punished a virtuous man as a criminal merely because he was poor.

After these general considerations our budding barrister turned to the case of his unfortunate client, a man who had sold his farm for Continental money and had been ruined by its depreciation. A deep scar in his side was all that he had to show for his services as a soldier at the battle of Bunker Hill. Rising then in his oratorical enthusiasm, he painted the hapless husbandman seeking through the drifting snow his log cabin; the taper's solitary ray lights up hope in his heart; the door opens; his children "run to lisp their sire's return"; the busy housewife prepares the frugal repast; the family Bible is opened, the psalm is sung, and the father of the family thanks God that his children are blessed with health, that they have a roof to cover them from the storm, that they may sleep in peace with none to disturb or to make them

afraid; but no sooner has he expressed that consoling thought than an appalling knock is heard; the door is thrown open; the bailiff enters; he brings the writ of execution issued in this cause; he arrests the helpless father, who is dragged through the pelting storm to a loathsome prison.

Was not this a case to be distinguished from those which encumbered the court's docket? Was not some consideration to be had for a brave man who had bled for that independence which enabled his honor to preside upon that bench?

He ceased, and all who heard him

were charmed and silent,-all but the judge, who during the delivery of the address sat with a vacant stare, sometimes at the orator, and then at the bar, until he broke silence: "I confess I am in rather a kind of a quandary; I profess I am somewhat dubus; I can't say that I know for sartin what the young gentleman would be at."

It was suggested that Dennie had spoken to a motion for a continuance.

"Oh," said the judge, "the young man wants the cause to be hung up for the next term, does he? Well, then, if that's all he wants, why couldn't he say so in a few words, without all this larry cum larry?"

By this time our advocate had taken his hat and gloves from the table and, casting a look of ineffable contempt. upon the Boeotian magistrate, had stalked out of the room. He never entered it again. When, to try him, ⚫ he was offered a case in a court where his fine speaking would be appreciated, he declined. "It may do for you," he said; "you can address the ignoble vulgar in their own Alsatian dialect; but it is the last time I will ever attempt to batter down a mud wall with roses."

He abandoned the law, and returned to Boston. It was not long, however, before he again directed his steps westward, and entered in earnest upon the literary career which was to make him famous. This time his tent was pitched at Walpole, where Isaiah Thomas had established a newspaper, in partnership with one Carlisle, a former apprentice and a native of that town. The paper was called The New Hampshire Journal and Farmer's Museum, and was a dingy sheet of eighteen inches by eleven, printed on coarse paper with poor, old-fashioned type. In 1796 Dennie became its conductor and gathered round him one of the most brilliant corps of writers ever engaged in a literary undertaking in this country.

There is something very interesting in the existence of a literary element at this time in what may be called not

incorrectly the wilds of New Hampshire. The Literary Club of Walpole -for so it was called-is a landmark in the literary history of New England. All its members were lawyers, or had studied law. With it was connected the Walpole Library Association, founded in 1795 by Jeremiah Mason, who lived in that town a short time and was the first librarian, Joseph Dennie being the second. All these men, interested in the library and the newspaper, were young, well educated, and full of literary ambition and of sociability. They all met with success, either in literature or at the bar. Their ambition had no more personal end in this respect than the advancement of letters. At their head stood Dennie, in spite of his rebuff at the bar, which can hardly be called a failure. There was a charm to his personality that made "Joe Dennie" popular wherever he went, as well on the banks of the Schuylkill as on those of the Connecticut. With his bright, vivacious, fascinating nature, he everywhere drew around him those interested in similar pursuits. He was always generous, always in good humor.

It was an era of sociability, promoted by conviviality, in which not always the fittest survived. The flowing bowl inspired many a New Hampshire Addison and Byron of the period. All classes were then addicted to what was called "the social glass." The customs of the editorial staff of the Farmer's Museum were closely imitated by the compositors and apprentices. Joseph T. Buckingham, afterwards a well known journalist in Boston, was for six months apprenticed to the publishers of the Museum. He asserts that he never spent a happy day while at work here. "Two hours had not elapsed," he says, "after my entrance into the office before I was called upon to treat. I resisted the call for several days, but was at length overcome by the daily and almost hourly annoyance, and more than half the small amount of money I pos