almost a Bostonese austerity about the great men of that early time and circle.  They wore their garments as Roman Senators wore their togas.  It was not good form for the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals.  To have done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow.  Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of “Ulalume,” “The Bells,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality.  No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them.  And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the impossible and unclubable personality.

After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant.  He held the office until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was seldom seen at the club except in official meetings.  An enthusiastic Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant’s death, when it had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York.  “Without formality or design, it had become an institute of mutual enlightenment among men knowing the worth of one another’s work, likened by Bellows, more than half seriously, to the French Academy.  A sure result of this communion was absolute equality among those who shared it.  No true Centurion ever assumed anything, each standing in his real place.  The atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams.  The pedant or the conceited person silently drifted away.  How could it be otherwise, while a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser forget to prose?” The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained “the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country.”  Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York.  In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the Pyramid.  Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into “The Story of an Untold Love,” calling it The Philomathean.  According to the hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry and dishonesty must fail, however it succeeded with the world, and where the poorest man stood on a par with the wealthiest.  The Centurion of all times has had much to be proud of, and he has not been blind to his blessings, nor ashamed to acquaint the world with his great good fortune.