James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Edward Everett Hale

In this little circle of the Mercantile Library managers he was the intimate friend of all.

      Older than either of these groups of men, there was a set of careful scholars in Boston whom I may distinguish as the historians. Dr. Palfrey once said to me that it was a sort of accident, as he thought, which turned the young literary men of Boston so much in the direction of history. The accident was that the two principal public libraries before 1850 were the Library of the Historical Society, and that of the Boston Athenæum, which was much larger. It so happened that in its earlier years the Athenæum collection was much strongest on the side of history. It also happened that in 1818 Mr. Israel Thorndike bought for Harvard College in one purchase the collection of early American authorities which had been made by Ebeling, a German collector in the first quarter of the century. This collection is still unrivaled. There was thus, so Dr. Palfrey said, a sort of temptation to young Bostonians to read and study American history. And it is almost fair to speak of the Boston “school of history” which was thus formed.

      I was a boy of eleven, reading to my mother on a summer afternoon, when my father brought into the room a black-haired, olive-complexioned, handsome young man, and said: “Here is Mr. Bancroft, my dear! The first volume of the History is finished, and he has come in to talk about printing and publishers.” This was the beginning of my acquaintance, I believe I may say friendship, with Mr. Bancroft, which lasted until he died in 1891.^[3]

      It is convenient to remember that he was as old as the century. In 1833, the time of which I speak, Prescott was already at work on “Ferdinand and Isabella.” Sparks had edited the “Diplomatic Correspondence,” and was collecting the materials for his “Washington.” Richard Hildreth, who edited the Boston “Atlas,” was preparing for his history of the United States. Palfrey in 1839 gave up his professorship at Cambridge that he might devote himself to the history of New England. Lothrop Motley is younger, but he published “Merrymount” as early as 1848. I may add that the patriotic anniversary orations of both the Everetts are historical studies. Edward Everett, in particular, had the historic sense and tact very delicately developed. Mr. Emerson once said of him that “for a man who threw out so many facts he was seldom convicted of a blunder.” To which remark I will add that Mr. Emerson also is always accurate in his frequent references to American history.

      It seems best to attempt this sketch of the literary surroundings of the life on which the young law student is now to enter. With every person who has been named, and, indeed, with almost everybody who had anything to do with letters in Boston, Lowell was personally acquainted; with many of them he was intimately acquainted.