Fifth Avenue Part 6

Lewrence, Charles King, E.T. Throop, and J. Depeyster Ogden. These were some of the men whose names were appended to the provisional const.i.tution drawn up on June 30, 1836. C. Fenno Hoffman, "next to Morris the sweetest song-writer America has produced," later became a member of the a.s.sociation, which from its inception, was the representative organization of the old families. Livingstons, Clasons, Dunhams, Griswolds, Van Cortlandts, Paines, Centers, Vandervoorts, Stuyvesants, Van Renssalaers, Irelands, Suydams, and other names of Knickerbocker fame, filled its list of members.h.i.+p with a sort of aristocratic monotony of that Knickerbockerism, which has since, to use the words of Mr. Fairfield again, "in solemn and silent Second Avenue (the Faubourg St. Germain of the city), earned the epithet of the Bourbons of New York." Solemn and silent Second Avenue is solemn and silent no more. Long since gone are the social glories of that thoroughfare that once boldly stepped forward to challenge the supremacy of the street that is the subject of this book. "Sic transit!" or something of the kind would have been the probable comment of Mr.

Fairfield, for he, in common with others of his age, delighted in flinging in a sc.r.a.p of Latin or French on every possible occasion. They were industrious investigators of the thesaurus in those days.

The first home of the Union, at No. 1 Bond Street, was in reality the house of its secretary, John H.L. McCrackan. In 1837 a building on Broadway near Leonard Street was secured, and the club moved into it, there to remain for three years. Then, for seven years, it was in a house on the other side of Broadway, and in 1847, obeying the prevalent impulse up-townward, it s.h.i.+fted its quarters to the spot from which it was later to remove to the Twenty-first Street home. That structure at Broadway and Fourth Street was the property of the Stuyvesant family, and after the departure of the men of the Union, was occupied by the confectioner Maillard as a hotel and restaurant. In 1852 the question of a permanent building began to be discussed, and in 1854 the land at the Twenty-first Street corner was secured and the work of erecting the structure that in its day was the most imposing of all that lined Fifth Avenue between Waverly Place and the Broadway junction begun. The club moved into the new quarters in May, 1855, at a time when its members.h.i.+p numbered approximately five hundred. In writing of the Union as it was in 1871 Mr. Fairfield made the comment that literature was hardly represented at all, and journalism only by Manton Marble of the "World."

As had been the case of Thackeray and the Athenaeum of London, Mr.

Marble, at the time of his first candidacy, had been blackballed. The objection, also as in the case of Thackeray, was ascribed not to the personality of the man, but to his profession. But Mr. Marble was eventually admitted through the efforts of a member of the Board of Directors, who declared boldly that not a new member should be elected until the blackb.a.l.l.s against the journalist had been withdrawn. Robert J. Dillon, landscape gardener, and J.H. Lazarus, portrait painter, were almost the sole art representatives, and in 1871 J. Lester Wallack was the only actor on the club list. Wallack's great contemporary of the stage, Edwin Booth, was a member of the Century and of the Lotos. The law of the day was represented by such men as Mayor Hall, until he resigned as a result of the criticism of fellow-members growing out of the exposures of the Tammany frauds in the summer and autumn of 1871, W.M. Evarts, Judge Garvin, Judge Gunning S. Bedford, Eli P. Norton, and John E. Burrill. Of men prominent in political and munic.i.p.al life were August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, Peter B. Sweeny, former Mayor George Opd.y.k.e, Isaac Bell, and Andrew H. Green, later to become the "Father of Greater New York." Among the dominant financial figures, in addition to August Belmont, were A.T. Stewart, John J. Cisco, Henry Clews, and John Jacob Astor. From the Army were U.S. Grant, then the nation's President, John H. Coster, George W. Cullom, Samuel W. Crawford, Howard Stockton, Rufus Ingalls, J.L. Rathbone, I.U.D. Reeve, and Stewart Van Vliet. From the Navy, James B. Breese, James Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M.

Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W.C. Leroy, L.M. Powell, and John H.

Wright.

By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century a.s.sociation might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth Avenue. The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual called "The Talisman." Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant, Verplanck, and Sands, and later Was.h.i.+ngton Irving and J.K. Paulding joined it. There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of members in turn. For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December.

Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the homes of the members. That organization was the embryo Century. The Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829. Four years before that a society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia College. That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new club.

The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in the City Hall Park. The call for the meeting had been sent out a few weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G.

Chapman, A.B. Burand, C.C. Ingham, A.M. Cozzens, F.W. Edmonds, and H.T.

Tuckerman. The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column. There were ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and three men of leisure. All were more or less representative men of the city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand of the day of the Union's formation, to a young metropolis of six hundred thousand. Gulian C. Verplanck was the club's first president, and back in his day began the Century's peculiar Twelfth Night Festival, which has been continued ever since. Twelfth Night with the Centurions is distinctive in that it is not an annual event nor the event of any given year. The very uncertainty of the ceremonial has added zest to the revel, which usually ends with an old-fas.h.i.+oned Virginia Reel. A few years ago the reel was led by Theodore Roosevelt and the late Joseph H.

Choate.

The first home of the Century, which it occupied for two years, was in rooms at 495 Broadway--between Broome and Spring Streets. During this period a journal called the "Century" was started, and edited by F.S.

Cozzens and John H. Gourley. Then, in 1848, the club moved to 435 Broome Street; thence, in 1850, to 575 Broadway; in 1852, to Clinton Place, where Thackeray learned to love it, and where, by virtue of proximity, it first laid claim to be regarded as a Fifth Avenue club.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE THE AVENUE AND THIRTY-FOURTH STREET CROSS STANDS THE BUILDING POPULARLY KNOWN AS THE KNICKERBOCKER TRUST COMPANY. HERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, "SARSAPARILLA" TOWNSEND BUILT IN BROWN-STONE, AND A.T. STEWART LATER BUILT IN WHITE MARBLE]

In Clinton Place the Century stayed until it went to its Fifteenth Street house, where it was so long to remain. Gulian Verplanck's presidency lasted for many years. At first it was a happy tenure of office. But the Civil War came, bringing with it grave dissensions.

Verplanck may be said to have invited the divisions that crept into the club, and which led to his overwhelming defeat in the election of 1864. He was succeeded by the historian Bancroft, who held office until 1868, when he resigned because of his departure for Prussia as the United States Minister to Berlin.

From the very day when it took form the Century seems to have had an atmosphere--almost a history. In the years long before the more modern clubs of a literary flavour were dreamed of, the Century was bringing together the leading men-of-letters and of art of New York. Yet somehow the Century of early times impresses newer generations as having been tremendously portentous and dignified. There was never any suggestion of Bohemia. After the establishment of the Century the gifted Poe was to enjoy, or rather to endure, two more years of life. By no stretch of the imagination can we think of his being in the club, even as the guest of an evening. There was plenty of good-fellows.h.i.+p, no doubt, and good cheer, but also the chill of a certain reserve. The talk seems, after all the years, to have been essentially serious--men expressing themselves not lightly, but judicially, and after long deliberation; Mr.

Bryant gravely conceding the right of Pope or Dryden or Watts, according to the subject of discussion, to be ranked as a poet, or denying the same, while members of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but preserving becoming reticence. There was almost a Bostonese austerity about the great men of that early time and circle. They wore their garments as Roman Senators wore their togas. It was not good form for the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals. To have done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"

at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the impossible and unclubable personality.

After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant. He held the office until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was seldom seen at the club except in official meetings. An enthusiastic Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant's death, when it had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York. "Without formality or design, it had become an inst.i.tute of mutual enlightenment among men knowing the worth of one another's work, likened by Bellows, more than half seriously, to the French Academy. A sure result of this communion was absolute equality among those who shared it. No true Centurion ever a.s.sumed anything, each standing in his real place. The atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams. The pedant or the conceited person silently drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher ill.u.s.trating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the Pyramid. Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into "The Story of an Untold Love," calling it The Philomathean. According to the hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry and dishonesty must fail, however it succeeded with the world, and where the poorest man stood on a par with the wealthiest. The Centurion of all times has had much to be proud of, and he has not been blind to his blessings, nor ashamed to acquaint the world with his great good fortune.

Although most of them began in side streets, and many of them have in the later years migrated again to side streets, through the greater part of their history the clubs here discussed belong essentially to the "Avenue" from which they have drawn so much of their inspiration. It does not matter that the present home of the Century is at 7 West Forty-third Street, or that the Lotos for the past few years has been at 110 West Fifty-seventh Street. They remain, as they always have been, Fifth Avenue clubs. Part of the history of the Lotos Club is written in the chapter dealing with "Some Great Days on the Avenue." For the fame of the organization as a giver of elaborate banquets to distinguished guests has spread through the land. The Lotos dates back to the early spring of 1870, when a group of young New York journalists met in the office of the New York "Leader" to take the initiatory steps necessary for the formation of a club. These men were De Witt Van Buren of the "Leader," Andrew C. Wheeler of the "Daily World," George W. Hows of the "Evening Express," F.A. Schwab of the "Daily Times," W.L. Alden of the "Citizen," and J.H. Elliot of the "Home Journal." As the founders were all connected with the literary, musical, art, or dramatic departments of their papers, it was not surprising that the projected a.s.sociation was to be modelled upon the Savage, Garrick, and Junior Garrick of London. Earlier failure had shown that a strictly literary organization was out of the question. A wider and more comprehensive members.h.i.+p was a necessity. As set forth in Article I., Section 2 of the Lotos Const.i.tution, the primary object of the club was "to promote social intercourse among journalists, literary men, artists, and members of the theatrical profession."

From the first temporary quarters in the parlours of the Belvidere House, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, the club moved into a permanent home at No. 2 Irving Place, a building adjoining the Academy of Music. In the autumn of 1870 the first president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A. Oakley Hall, then the Mayor of New York, who a.s.sumed the office entirely in his social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts. It was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Sat.u.r.day Nights." There is a flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period. Among the artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and Ba.s.sford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring, Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.

Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new club. The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several. To those years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic (1868), and the Union League (1863). The last named organization owes its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War of Secession. Unite to stand behind the President with our full strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form the plans for the new a.s.sociation. At the beginning there was talk of adopting the name "Loyal League." The first work of the club was the organization of negro troops in New York City. Despite the opposition of Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth Regiment of U.S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months, two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.

In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Early in 1868 the Union League moved to a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and the Manhattan Club. The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for the use of the Jockey Club, but was leased to the Union League for a term of ten years. Among the early honorary members of the Union League were Abraham Lincoln, General U.S. Grant, General W.T. Sherman, Lieutenant-General "Phil" Sheridan, Major-Generals Burnside, Wright, and Hanc.o.c.k, Admiral David G. Porter, and Rear-Admiral Bailey. The active members.h.i.+p of 1870 included such names as William Cullen Bryant, William M. Evarts, Whitelaw Reid, Parke G.o.dwin, Horace Greeley, Chester A.

Arthur, Thomas Nast, Joseph H. Choate, Eastman Johnson, George P.

Putnam, Daniel P. Appleton, Dr. Samuel Osgood, George Griswold, E.D.

Stanton.

To the name of the Union League is inevitably linked that of the Manhattan Club, for, the Civil War once at an end, the latter became the expression of the political aims and aspirations of the Democratic Party as the former was of the Republican. The Manhattan had its origin in the turmoil of the election of 1864, and the defeat of the Democratic candidate, General McClellan. The first movers in its foundation were Dougla.s.s Taylor, then secretary of the Tammany society, Street Commissioner George W. McLean, S.L.M. Barlow of the "World," Judge Hilton, the Hon. A. Sch.e.l.l, A.L. Robertson, and John T. Hoffman, later Governor of New York State from 1869 till 1872. The earlier meetings were held in the old Delmonico's, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, and then the Manhattan moved into its first real home at No. 96 Fifth Avenue, just a block above the famous restaurant, where many of the meetings continued to be held. John Van Buren was the first president, with Augustus Sch.e.l.l first vice-president, A.L. Robertson second vice-president, Manton Marble secretary, and W. Butler Duncan treasurer.

In the winter of 1867-8 the club was enlivened by a bout of fisticuffs that was a "celebrated case" of its day. There was then a strict club rule forbidding the introduction of a guest. Manager Bateman, the father of Miss Bateman the actress, saw fit to violate this law. A member of the House Committee, perhaps overzealous in the idea of his duties, carried his protest to the point of forbidding the servants of the club to serve the unwelcome guest. Mr. Bateman's resentment of the action took the form of a personal a.s.sault, which became the sensation of the hour and the topic of the newspapers. "Evidently," remarked the "Herald" (those were the days of the elder Bennett, who in his vast experience in New York journalism had more than once felt the sting of a horse-whip), "to be slapped is what some faces are made for!" But the Governors did not see the matter in the light that the "Herald" did, and the pugilistically inclined manager was summarily expelled, the board refusing to settle the matter by accepting his resignation.

Another Fifth Avenue club that claimed 1865 as the year of its origin was the Traveller's. For obvious reasons many of the clubs of the seventh decade of the last century chose to be near the old Delmonico restaurant, and the Traveller's was no exception, making its first home on the opposite corner. The object of the a.s.sociation was to bring together travellers of all nations, and to do proper honour to distinguished who were visiting the United States. After two years at the Fourteenth Street corner the Traveller's moved northward to a new home at No. 222 Fifth Avenue, the George W. Burnham residence at Eighteenth Street. Mr. Fairfield apparently did not regard the club with entire favour, for in his book of 1873 he speaks of the club-house as being "a leading resort for America-examining Englishmen, and the headquarters of an English coterie of considerable social importance."

"_O tempora! O mores_!" he exclaims. There were palmy days in the past, when the receptions were social reunions of _eclat_. But "they have made an end of all that, having settled into a body as quiet as Mr. Mantilini expected to be after taking a bath in the Thames." But, granting Mr.

Fairfield's claim that the literary quality of the Traveller's had deteriorated, there still remained the list of Honorary Members carrying a certain prestige. Professor Louis Aga.s.siz headed the list; and others were Paul Du Chaillu, the African explorer whose adventures were for a long time regarded as clever romance; the Hon. Anson Burlingame, who had been an envoy from the Chinese Emperor; Sir Samuel Baker, of London; Rev. J.C. Fletcher, Professor Raphael Pumpelly, the Right Rev. Bishop Southgate, the Hon. J. Ross Browne, and M. Michel Chevalier, of the French Senate.

"Lotos and Arcadian: both stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed, after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear the music of corn-growing, the mystic throes of buds toiling into blossom; the other of a land where it is always about eight o'clock in the morning with the dew still on the meadow-gra.s.s, and the world rubbing its eyes and brus.h.i.+ng away cobwebs of dream, before buckling down to the struggle. The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of _keff_, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its shepherds:

"'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep, Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,'

of Pindar, of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic, the other beautiful, both symbolical."

With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in the latter's particular field. Writing men s.n.a.t.c.hed up into the clouds in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for ill.u.s.trations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book, also in his chapter about the Arcadian Club.

"Gentlemen of society, bankers, stylish young men with vast ideas of personal importance, amateurs and patrons! City Hall is the brain of New York, of the continent, and it is one of the laws of the world that brains will rule. Rebel as muscles merely of the body politic, and ye rebel against inexorable law: that scribbling _literati_ in the fifth story--for newspapers like men have their brains in the upper story--is more potent than you in settling the artistic position of a Lucca or a Rubenstein, a d.i.c.kens or a Dore, a Tennyson or a Carlyle. Have ye ever read a wonderful little ballad by Uhland, ent.i.tled 'The Minstrel's Curse?' If so, recall it--for it is typical, not of that which comes by-and-by, but of that which is: the exponent of the beautiful having become in his way an autocrat. Unfortunate it is that journalism is not always representative of the best culture--that managing editors will now and then entrust criticism to incompetents, but its popular power is quite the same, notwithstanding, and this good the popular newspaper has wrought, to wit--that the exponent of the arts, media of culture as they are, is no longer dependent upon the caprices and whims of isolated patrons, nor hampered in his freedom of expression by canons of theirs."

And so on ad infinitum. The present writer confesses in all humility that he has not the least idea as to what the eloquent gentleman meant.

But remember that it was the age that produced the "St. Elmo" of Augusta Evans Wilson.

CHAPTER VIII

_Literary Landmarks and Figures_

Literary Landmarks and Figures--A Vision of Pall Mall--The Paris of the Forties--Mark Twain's Fifth Avenue Home--In the Time of Poe--Where Henry James was Born--The Old University Building--An Encounter in Was.h.i.+ngton Square--Clinton Place--Memories of the Past--Irving, Cooper, Halleck, Drake, d.i.c.kens, and Trollope as Shades of the Avenue--A Home of Janvier--The "Griffou Push"--The Tenth Street Studio Building--The Tile Club--The Cary Sisters--Stoddard, Whittier, Aldrich, and Ripley--"Peter Parley"--"f.a.n.n.y Fern"--James Parton--Some Figures of the Recent Past.

If, of a day of the fifties of the last century, I had been an arrival in London, my first thought would probably have been of a sole at Sweeting's or a slice of saddle of mutton at Simpson's in the Strand, provided, of course, that the establishments named then existed, and the dishes in question were as delectable as in later years, when I came to know them in the life. The baser appet.i.te satisfied, the first pilgrimage would have been, not to the Tower, or to Lambeth Palace, or the British Museum, but to Pall Mall, in the hopes of catching a glimpse, in a club window or on the pavement, of the "good grey head" of Thackeray. The first impression might have been disappointing. There was in the spectacles and high-carried chin something pompous and supercilious. The great man, had he noticed them at all, would probably have been quite contemptuous of my admiring glances, his mind occupied with the idea of winning a nod from a pa.s.sing duke; but I would have seen the "good grey head," and thrilled at the memory of "Vanity Fair"

and "Henry Esmond." Similarly, in the Paris of that time or of a little earlier period, I would have considered the day well spent if in the course of it I had seen Victor Hugo with his umbrella, riding on the Imperiale of an omnibus, or the good Dumas exhibiting his woolly pate conspicuously in a boulevard cafe, or the author of "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" posing at a table in the Restaurant de Paris or Bignon's, or the fat figure of M. de Balzac waddling in the direction of a printing house to toil and groan and sweat over the proofs of the latest addition to the "Comedie Humaine." We cannot behold such giants in our generation, city, and street. Yet Fifth Avenue, from the day the first houses pushed northward from Was.h.i.+ngton Square, has had its literary landmarks, figures, and traditions.

Ten years ago, had you been pa.s.sing of a summer's day a house at the southeast corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street, you might have seen emerging from the front door, a figure clad in white flannel, and looked upon the countenance of the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It was, and is, a house of red brick, a house of three stories and a high bas.e.m.e.nt, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church.

The number is 21. Clemens went to live there in the autumn of 1904, remaining for a time at the near-by Grosvenor while the new habitation was being put in order, and the home furniture that had been brought from Hartford was being installed. When No. 21 was ready for occupation, only Clemens and his daughter Jean went to live there, for Clara had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness, and the shock of her death, and was in retirement under the care of a trained nurse.

Clemens, according to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was lonely in No. 21, and sought to liven matters by installing a great aeolian Orchestrelle. In January, 1906, Paine paid his first visit to the house and found the great man propped up in bed, with his head at the foot, turning over the pages of "Huckleberry Finn" in search of a paragraph about which some random correspondent had asked explanation.

But to go back long before Clemens's time, and to begin in the neighbourhood of the old square. In the days when Fifth Avenue was young Poe must have found his way there, accompanied, perhaps, by the pale, invalided Virginia, to gaze at the fine new houses, for only a few hundred yards away was his last city residence, where Lowell called and found his host "not himself that day," and where were penned "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," the "Philosophy of Composition," and "The Literati of New York." Then there was the house in Waverly Place, the home of Anne Lynch, the poet of "The Battle of Life," which was a kind of literary salon of its day, where Poe once read aloud the newly published "Raven," and where Bayard Taylor visited, and Taylor's friend Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Child, and Ann S.

Stephens, who wrote "Fas.h.i.+on and Famine" and "Mary Derwent," and young Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Barstow, who became his wife. Not far from the Lynch house was the humble dwelling in which Poe wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Just off the Square, at 21 Was.h.i.+ngton Place, Henry Jones was born. In a house that once stood at the northwest corner Bayard Taylor lived for a time and wrote the "Epistle from Mount Tmolus," and some of the "Poems of the Orient." In later days a large apartment house grew up on the site, and there George Parsons Lathrop dwelt, and penned some of the verse of his "Days and Dreams," while his wife, the daughter of the author of "The Scarlet Letter," composed portions of "Along the Sh.o.r.e."

In the old University building on the east side of the Square Theodore Winthrop--later as Colonel Winthrop to meet a soldier's death at Big Bethel--wrote "John Brent," and the famous but utterly dreary "Cecil Dreeme," and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years of their pseudo-Bohemia. Across the Square N.P. Willis, the town's crack descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one occasion with sorry results. The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his path and fell upon him with vigorous a.s.sault. Bystanders were on the point of intervening. "Stand back, gentlemen!" cried the Thespian. "He has interfered in my domestic affairs." And he proceeded with the whacking.

Not only the Square, but the side streets below Fourteenth, must be taken into a consideration of the old literary landmarks and figures of Fifth Avenue. Thackeray was only one of the foreign authors visiting America who found ease and comfort in the club-house of the Century in Clinton Place. In the same thoroughfare lived and died Evert Augustus Duyckinck, co-author with his brother George of the "Cyclopedia of American Literature," and author of "The War for the Union"; and Mrs.

Botta, the Anne Lynch of earlier mention, had for a time a home there; and in the street Richard Watson Gilder dwelt later, and in No. 33, in a third-story back room, a young clerk named Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote his "Ballad of Babie Bell"; and there, at No. 84 which was the residence of Judge Daly, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu wrote fiction and fact that by sceptical contemporaries was generally accepted as fiction.

A block farther north was another home of Mrs. Botta, and the house of the actress who is remembered as Tom Moore's first sweetheart, and the one-time abode of William Cullen Bryant, who wrote of it as being near the home of Irving's friend Brevoort. The neighbourhood is rich with memories. We have but to beckon and the ghosts of those literary men and women whose names have been forgotten, and of those whose reputations have endured, step forth in imagination to fill the street. I see Irving, down from his Sunny side estate for a visit to the town that was once the fat village of his Diedrich Knickerbocker, strolling over from the Irving Place structure that is reputed to have been his, but which was not his, to study the new manners and fas.h.i.+ons, and to mull on the startling changes and swift pa.s.sage of time. I see the irascible author of the "Leather Stocking Tales," for the moment weary of squabbling over land agreements with his Cooperstown neighbours and prosecuting suits against up-state newspapers, stealing into New York for a glimpse of his first city residence down in Beach Street in Greenwich Village, where he wrote "The Pilot," and "Lionel Lincoln," and incidentally satisfying his curiosity as to the new developments in urban elegance and fas.h.i.+on. I can see FitzGreene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, a mile or two away from their accustomed haunts; and any one else whom it pleases me to see; our foreign guests and critics, d.i.c.kens, looking about superciliously, or Anthony Trollope, breathing hard, or Trollope _mere_, or Harriet Martineau, or Captain Marryat, or Mayne Reid, or Samuel Lover. For in a case like this a trifling matter like an anachronism or a misstatement counts for little or nothing.

On Ninth Street, just west of the Charles De Rhams house, which was formerly the Henry Brevoort house, are the two or three buildings that in bygone days made up the Hotel Griffou. There, twenty years or so ago, the late Thomas A. Janvier lived and studied the queer Latin-American types that went into his stories of the Efferanti family. There also William Dean Howells frequently dined, and the late Edmund Clarence Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder went from time to time. Then the older and more dignified men drifted away, and the tables in the dining room rang with the laughter and high talk of a younger group, known as the "Griffou Push." Brave dreams were there, and limitless ambitions, and some achievement. But in many cases _Pallida mors_ came knocking all too soon, and those who lived sought other environments, and the "Push" was no more, and the little hotel became a memory of yesterday.

There were literary a.s.sociations about the old Studio Building in Tenth Street long before the "Old Masters" of New York went there to work, and Carmencita came to dance in Chase's studio. In the big brown structure Henry T. Tuckerman once lived, and kept his library, and wrote "The Criterion," and the "Book of the Artists," and entertained his friends of the world of letters; and there Fitzjames...o...b..ien, the genial Fitz, the "gipsy of letters," the author of "The Diamond Lens," visited him.

Almost across the street, in a little rear wooden house that was to serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Gra.s.shopper, or the Marine, or the Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, or Cadmius, or Polyphemus.

A little off the Avenue, on East Twentieth Street, was the home of the Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe; and to the unpretentious little brick dwelling of Sunday evenings repaired Stoddard, and Whittier, and Aldrich, and Ripley, and Herman Melville, and Mary L. Booth, who afterwards became Mrs. Lamb, and wrote the "History of New York," and Samuel G. Goodrich, the famous "Peter Parley," and Alice Haven, popular writer of juvenile tales, and Justin McCarthy, and James Parton, husband of "f.a.n.n.y Fern," himself one of these rare scribes of his age whose writing can be genuinely enjoyed by readers of the present generation, and occasionally, grim old Horace Greeley, who, if, as he said, in the course of forty years had never been able to get a day off to go "a-fis.h.i.+ng," managed, now and then, to find an evening of leisure in which to divert himself with the pleasant, bookish talk at No. 53. A _salon_ as "was a _salon_"--that of the Cary girls. With the vast, unwieldy city of today in mind we wonder how they managed it, by what charm and persuasion they gathered with such regularity so many of the _literati_ really worth while. But it was a smaller town then. It was easier to be neighbourly. When Thackeray, on the evening of New Year's Day, 1853, journeyed in a sleigh from his hotel to a reception held in a house on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets, the destination was characterized as a villa in the country.

To revert to the note with which this chapter began. Were it possible for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of a Thackeray, a d.i.c.kens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of "Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend. I was very young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of "A Daughter of the Tenements," and I wished that all the world might see.

Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly recognition; or to pa.s.s Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank R. Stockton, or Mr. Gilder and Mr. Johnson of the "Century," or Brander Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.