. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. rary life of the city. It was clever,and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon attacked all literary shams but its owm, and it madeitself felt and feared. The young writers throughoutthe country were ambitious to be seen in it, and theygave their best to it; they gave literally, for the Satur-day Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying,vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to saythat it was very nearly as well for one to be acceptedby the P?^ess as to be accepted by the Atlant
. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. rary life of the city. It was clever,and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon attacked all literary shams but its owm, and it madeitself felt and feared. The young writers throughoutthe country were ambitious to be seen in it, and theygave their best to it; they gave literally, for the Satur-day Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying,vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to saythat it was very nearly as well for one to be acceptedby the P?^ess as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and forthe time there was no other literary comparison. Tobe in it was to be in the company of Fitz JamesOBrien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Sted-man, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveli-est in verse at that day in New York. It w^as a power,and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it, Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone, the Presswas very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not 70. ;sD CLAUKInCE STEDMAN MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK like snapping-turtle so mncli as I once did, and I havegrown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtleof the very best. What is certain is that I went tothe office of the Saturday Press in New York withmuch the same sort of feeling I had in going to theoffice of the Atlantic Mojithly in Boston, but I cameaway with a very different feeling. I had found therea bitterness against Boston as great as the bitternessagainst respectability, and as Boston was then rapidlybecoming my second country, I could not join in thescorn thought of her and said of her by the fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the liter-ary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions hehad experienced in visiting other shrines; but I foundno harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shock-ed, and I thought I knew better how to value certainthings o
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