Old Cambridge. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. (Mace inillan and Co.
tis.)—This is a very pleasant, chatty, and not too literary volume on an American literary centre of the past rather than the present. It leads off very appropriately and effectively what promises to be an excellent series of "National Studies in American Letters," that will also deal with such attractive subjects as "The American Historical Novel," "Southern Humourists," and "The Clergy in American Life and Letters." The pleasant old New England town, which was founded in 1630, which is the seat of Harvard University; and which is full of the memories of Washington, who there assumed command of the " rebel " troops in 1735, Was, of course, worth recalling and, to some extent, reproducing. But, then, it was also worth reviving in literature for its associations with Long- fellow, Holmes, and Lowell, and the beginnings of the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Higginson, who seems to have been on friendly, if not specially intimate, terms with the master minds of Old Cambridge, to have known all about them if no to have exactly known them, has written a book which cannot be said to be egotistic in any other than a harmless, and even pleasant, sense. Indeed, his egotism is prac- tically confined to the publication of some letters, mainly of a business character, which he received from Lowell. For the rest, Old Cambridge is a. most agreeable mélange of gossip, history, reminiscence, and characterisation. The last does not suffer from the fact that it is amiably superficial rather than intensely critical.
Previous page
