34 LITERARY ASSOCIATION. 
bers, in all parts of the country, there is no douht; but 
both because nearly all of them have been formed in very 
recent years and because little has been published con- 
cerning them, interesting facts relating to them are not 
accessible. There is, I believe, in Philadelphia, a club of 
this character, which has existed more than one hundred 
years, but I know of no other that has attained even so 
moderate an old age. 
Among the knot of authors and students who made 
Boston the literary centre a quarter of a century ago or 
a little more, there were formed, probably, the most no- 
table of any American associations of this character. 
The name about which, in most minds, the thought of 
these Boston gatherings centre, is that of Emerson. Yet, 
though he wasa member of many of them, he was, to 
use again Dr. Johnson’s word, in some respects one of 
the least ‘‘clubable’’? of men. His biographer tells us 
that he was always ready for a project of a club or 
meeting for conversation, though all his experience was 
against them. 
‘¢ Shall I paint,’’ says Emerson in his journal, ‘an ex- 
perience so conspicuous to me and so often repeated in 
these late years as the Debating Club, now under the 
name of Teachers’ meetings, now a Conference, now an 
Esthetic Club and now a Religious Association, but al- 
ways bearing for me the same fruit, a place where my 
memory works more than my wit and so I come away 
with compunction.”’ 
Emerson was one of the original members of the 
‘‘Saturday Club”? which included also Longtellow, 
Holmes, Agassiz, Judge Hoar and Lowell, Indeed 
Holmes: says that Emerson was the nucleus around 
which the club formed itself. He enjoyed the meetings 
and went regularly until his powers began to fail, but, 
while he extolled the conversational powers of his asso- 
ciates, his own attitude was that of a listener. Carlyle 
