the thing is explicitly said with the haunting emphasis of

The most momentous result of Aldrich's association with the Bohemians was that when, in October, 1858, a new paper called the "Saturday Press" was started by Clapp, to carry pure literature, as it was conceived by the Bohemians, to express epigrammatic views of current pretences, Aldrich became an associate editor, along with O'Brien and Mr. Winter. For a few months apparently he combined this with his work on the "Home Journal," but early in 1859 he seems to have abandoned the latter post and devoted himself wholly to the "Saturday Press" and miscellaneous writing.

The vivacity and epigrammatic valor of the "Saturday Press" gave it a succès d'estime, at least, from its first inception. On December 17, 1858, Aldrich wrote to F. H. Underwood, assistant editor of the "Atlantic:" "The 'Saturday Press' is on its feet. It is growing. It will be a paper." For the first year of its life its young editors were in very hopeful spirits. In his "Literary Friends and Acquaintance" Mr. Howells has given one of his incomparably vivid and faithful impressions of the "Saturday Press" and the tone of its office:

"It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New York literature to my imagination, for I certainly associated other names with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the 'Saturday Press' myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the 'Saturday Press' never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the 'Press' as to be accepted by the 'Atlantic,' and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was

liveliest in prose or loveliest in verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it, 'Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone,' the 'Press' was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then; I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is that I went to the office of the 'Saturday Press' in New York with much the same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the 'Atlantic Monthly' in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather shy, and the King of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with 'Oh, a couple of shysters!' and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope again that men who took them