How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in
the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in
it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait
of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated
gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and ladies,
too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and
Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women,
not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable
rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival
landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in
those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the
portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a
hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and
dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's
coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing;
and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with
the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the
Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or
criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in
those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned
fish-horns?

If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
butterflies. The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very
respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by
that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of