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CHAPTER VII

A Glimpse at Literary Boston — Prescott, Emerson, and Agassiz — Barley's Picture of Washington Irving and His Friends — The Knickerbocker Magazine — Mrs. Botta's Salon — Reminiscences of Bancroft and Bryant — A Birthday at the Century Club — Longfellow.

Although we did not leave home as much in those days as residents of New York do now — we had nowhere to go, unless we made a long, wearisome journey to Florida for a cough — we still found time for visits to Washington and to Boston.

I, being a New England woman, was true to my Boston, and went to Nahant in summer as well as to Cambridge in winter. There I saw Prescott and Agassiz, and Lowell and Longfellow, and, much later on, the youthful Howells, just beginning his successful career; and Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, and Dr. Holmes, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, most witty of women. It was "the Illuminati"; it was most delightful, and Mr. Prescott was one of its distinguished members.

Mr. Prescott was a true son of Boston; well-born, well-bred, of extremely dignified and agreeable manners, and with a delicate and nobly chiselled face. He was a perfect man of the world, fond of society, and with not the slightest touch of the pedant about him. I saw him frequently and intimately at his Nahant house and at the neighboring villa of his daughter, Mrs. Lawrence, who was an admirable hostess as well as a beautiful woman. Although he was past sixty when I first