genius. . . calling away the student from questions which gender strife to contemplations on the works of nature . . . stimulating the finished scholar to explore new tracts in the regions of science . . . and, in publishing all that diversity of intelligence, for obtaining which a character of this sort has long been desired, and in whose absence

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desart air.

Such are the fond and anxious sensibilities, with which we stretch our views to the future labours, consequence, and honours of our adopted ward.

But, alas, amidst the chances and changes of the mundane state, what is permanent? and how many paternal hopes are annually blasted! If the offspring of our affection should prove idle, ingrateful, or profligate if, losing all respect for our authority, he should commit himself to the guidance of unskilful hands, or, guideless, add to the number of rash innovators of the present age . . . should he turn philosophist in science, heretick in religion, empirick in nosology . . instead of nourishing, should he attempt to destroy the liberties of the state, become the pander of sedition, and prophanely rail against law and justice . . should he, as a critick, be malicious or revengeful, pertinaciously severe, or habitually indiscreet. . . nay, even should he once basely tell tales of an innocent family, or wilfully wrong the meanest individual, we shall immediately spurn him from our presence, withhold our aids, and leave him to his demerits . . . the neglect of the virtuous, and the applause of the vile.

BOSTON, Jan. 1, 1805.

Behind all the playfulness of this Preface one feels a blending of good breeding and good sense which augured well for the new undertaking. The good

sense is clearly exhibited in the editor's desire that his charge should not "commit himself to the guidance of unskilful hands." It has been seen that steps to avert this danger had already been taken by the editor's surrounding himself with a highly competent corps of regular contributors. The natural step which came next was the organization of this corps into a definite club, the Anthology Society, which made itself responsible for the magazine. Loosely bound together through the greater part of 1805, the Society in October of that year adopted a Constitution and addressed itself regularly to its task.

It is worth while to consider the quality of the men who made up this Society, if only to form some idea of the type which they represented; for the composite personality of a board conducting a periodical is no less important than the individuality of an editor who does his work single-handed. The original members of the Society were fourteen in number. They chose as their President the Rev. John Sylvester John Gardiner. Forty years old in 1805, he was the senior member of the Society, as in certain respects he was the most conspicuous. Since 1792 he had been Assistant Minister at Trinity Church, Boston, of which he became Rector in 1805. Since 1794 he had conducted a school for boys. His own training, under the famous Dr. Samuel Parr in England, had prepared him admirably to maintain the strictest standard of classical taste and scholarship. The pulpit and the

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terests.

schoolroom, however, did not exercise all his powers, and in the magazine he found a supplementary vehicle for the expression of his widely varied intellectual inTo the Vice-Presidency the Society chose the Rev. William Emerson. The minister of the First Church was, of necessity, a man of the first importance in the Boston of 1805. For the spirit which he could bring to a magazine his own words have already spoken with sufficient clearness. He was but one year older than the third important member, the Rev. John Thornton Kirkland, minister of the New South Church, who was thirty-six years of age when elected to the Society in 1806, and four years later became President of Harvard College.

The age of these members has been specified with care for the simple reason that, by no means venerable themselves, they were so much older than their fellow Anthologists. The Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster was but twenty-one years old in 1805. William Tudor, Jr., one of the most zealous and competent of all the little band, was but twenty-six. Arthur Maynard Walter, the first Secretary, whose early death was a grievous loss to the Society, was only twentyfive. William Smith Shaw, later known as "Athenæum Shaw," from his exceeding devotion to the Library which the Society founded, was twenty-seven. And so one might go on through the list, finding nearly every one of the fourteen original and fourteen subsequently chosen members a young graduate of