saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
may be the secret of Boston.




II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the