PATRICIAN DIRECTION OF THOUGHT 211
met at one another's homes for conviviality, talk, and praise of the writings of their fellows. Frequently these groups fostered a periodical. The Anthology Club in Boston maintained The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review; the Literary Confederacy of New York supported various ventures, as did the Ugly Club, the Bread and Cheese Club, and others similarly famed for wit and revelry. In Philadelphia the Tuesday Club was a pillar of strength to The Port Folio; and at the famous "parties" of Dr. Caspar Wistar and the celebrated soirees of Robert Walsh, Catholic journalist and critic, literary gossip and brilliant talk flourished. The Portico was launched by a literary circle in Baltimore; at Charleston the Literary and Philosophical Club became known for the high intellectual tone of its gatherings.
Most of the men of letters and science in whose hands lay the advancement of culture came from substantial families able to indulge their sons'" interest in literature or learning. Wealth ultimately derived from land enabled scions of well-to-do families to promote cultural values as patrons or scholars. De Witt Clinton, governor of New York, sponsored educational and scientific enterprises; Edward Livingston, who also followed politics, was the author of a scholarly legal code for Louisiana. James Fenimore Cooper was endowed from the landed estates of his family in central New York. In South Carolina plantation wealth enabled John Izard Middleton to study archeology abroad and to win praise for the excellence of his drawings in his Grecian Remains in Italy (1812), a pioneer work in its field; Stephen Elliott, an authority on the natural history of South Carolina, for a time managed the family plantation. Virginia's brilliant social philosopher, John Taylor of Caroline, supported his family from his plantations while he wrote tracts on agricultural reform and systematic treatises blasting the centralizing and capitalistic developments in American government and economic life.
Directly or indirectly commerce also enabled many men to enjoy the luxury of letters and scholarship. Sometimes men of affairs became patrons of literature and science. Thus in 1818 the rich Boston merchant Israel Thorndike purchased for Harvard the treasury of books that Ebeling, the great German authority on America, had collected. After helping to build a fortune by marketing ice in the tropics, William Tudor of Boston devoted himself to critical and descriptive writing and to the editorship of the North American Review, which he founded in