The Friendly Club and Other Portraits

THE thanks of the author are due to Mr. Charles Hopkins Clark, Editor of "The Hartford Courant," in which most of the following essays originally appeared anonymously, for permission to republish them in the revised, enlarged and sometimes entirely re-written form in which they are here presented. "The Friendly Club," "The Mystery of the Bell Tavern" and "Our Battle Laureate" have not been previously printed.

Citation of authorities, except so far as they appear in the text, has been considered inappropriate in the case of such informal articles as these. It would be ungracious, however, to omit mention of the writer's indebtedness in connection with the second essay to Mr. Charles Knowles Bolton's "The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery," which is the latest and most comprehensive document on this baffling incident of New England social history.

F. P.

CONTENTS

PAGE I The Friendly Club 13 II The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 47 III The Hemans of America 69 IV Whom the Gods Love 83 V An Eccentric Visitor 95 VI Who Was Peter Parley? 107 VII A Preacher of the Gospel 121 VIII A Friend of Lincoln 135 IX Our Battle Laureate 147 X The Temple of the Muses 161 XI The Friend of Youth 181 XII The Christmas Party 191 XIII The Fabric of a Dream 201 XIV The Quiet Life 213

ILLUSTRATIONS

JOEL BARLOW Frontispiece From the engraving by Durand after the portrait by Robert Fulton

LEXINGTON MONUMENT AND BELL TAVERN, DANVERS 64 From Barber's "Massachusetts Historical Collections"

THE SIGOURNEY MANSION 75 From an old woodcut

LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY 78 From a miniature in the Colt Collection by permission of the Wadsworth Atheneum

INSCRIPTION TO DANIEL WADSWORTH IN J. G. C. BRAINARD'S HAND 91

TITLE PAGE OF BRAINARD'S "OCCASIONAL PIECES OF POETRY" 92

THE WATKINSON LIBRARY 166 Drawing by Seth Talcott

SILHOUETTE OF DANIEL WADSWORTH 170 By permission of The Connecticut Historical Society

I: The Friendly Club

A HARVARD man, not exempt from the complacency sometimes attributed to graduates of his university, once observed, according to Barrett Wendell, that the group of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close of the eighteenth century attained a brief measure of fame as the "Hartford Wits," represents the only considerable literary efflorescence of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the rejoinder, doubtless from a Yale source, that nevertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits flourished no Harvard man had produced literature half so good as theirs.

How good this literature was considered in its day is not readily understood by the modern reader, for from the Hudibrastic imitations and heroic couplets of these writers, whose brilliance was dimmed so long ago, the contemporary flavor has long since evaporated. Indeed there is no modern reader in the general sense. It is only the antiquarian, the literary researcher, the casual burrower among the shelves of some old library who now opens these yellow pages and follows for a few moments the stilted lines that seem to him a diluted imitation of Pope, Goldsmith and Butler. Professor Beers of Yale ventures the surmise that he may be the only living man who has read the whole of Joel Barlow's "Columbiad."

Yet in their time this coterie of poets, who gathered in the little Connecticut town after the close of the war for independence, became famous not only in their own land but abroad, and the community where most of them lived and met at their "friendly club"--was it at the Black Horse Tavern or the "Bunch of Grapes"?--shone in reflected glory as the literary center of America. No Boswell was among them to record the sparkling epigrams, the jovial give and take, the profound "political and philosophical" debates of those weekly gatherings. Yet imagination loves to linger on the old friendships, the patriotic aspirations, the common passion for creative art, the wooing of the Muses of an older world, thus dimly shadowed forth against the background of the raw young country just embarking on its mysterious experiment.