Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[104] the more strenuous reformers of its day, however brilliant, except Emerson and occasionally Sumner and Howe. Edmund Quincy and James Freeman Clarke were not admitted until 1875, after the abolition of slavery. Garrison, Parker, Phillips, Alcott, Wasson, Weiss, and William Henry Channing were never members of the Saturday Club and probably never could have been elected to it; but they were to be looked for every month at the Radical Club,afterward called the Chestnut Street Club,which certainly rivalled the Saturday in brilliancy in those days, while it certainly could not be said of it, as Dr. Holmes said of the Saturday, “We do nothing but tell our old stories; we never discuss anything.” Possibly all such gatherings tend to be somewhat more conspicuous in retrospect as time goes on; men recall the bright sayings and forget the occasional gaps of triviality or dulness. I remember when Fields, on once inviting me to dine with him at the Saturday Club, during a visit to Boston, cautioned me not to expect too much; “We are sometimes stupid,” he said. I know that in thinking of the Atlantic