Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[18] literature; that of George Livermore, devoted especially to Bibles and Biblical literature; and that of Thomas Dowse, a leather-dresser in Cambridgeport, whose remarkable historical collections were bequeathed to the Massachusetts Historical Society. At a time when the Harvard Library held but forty thousand books, these collections had a relative importance which they would not now possess. They were enough to make Cambridge overbalance Boston, in its library opportunities, whereas for music and the plastic arts Cambridge had then as now to seek Boston; and at that day would have been more liable even than Boston to the criticism made by a brilliant New York woman, upon the latter city, some thirty years ago, that it was a place where music, painting, and sculpture “seemed to be regarded simply as branches of literature” ; in other words, people knew more of the biographies of artists than of their works.

We boys knew the early traditions of Cambridge: of the famous hunt which brought in seventy-six wolves' heads as late as 1696, and the hunts which yielded many bears annually down