been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical
School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott
and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The
former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_,
appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23,
and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued
in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers,
Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge
was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such
as Lowell described it in his article, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_,
originally contributed to _Putnam's Monthly_ in 1853, and afterward
reprinted in his _Fireside Travels_, 1864. The situation of a
university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one.
Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs,
its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc.,
he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded
avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming
distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel blue
sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh.
There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced
between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about
Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting
upon one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the closer
circles--all concentric to the university--of which this group was
loosely composed were laughed at by outsiders as "Mutual Admiration
Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members
were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard,
and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful
lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry
R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer of them.