of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
beginning.  I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
better for good society. 

Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
be good family.  If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
Tories at the time of the Revolution.  To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest.  Boston was
small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
Venice.  But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
they had for one to the manner born.  I say had, for I doubt whether in
Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics.  The most famous, if