The booksellers were not slow to feel the new spirit that had come over the people. Boston has always been famous for its bookstores, having had, at times, more than were to be found elsewhere on the whole continent. In 1801 the booksellers of the town formed an association called the "Boston Association of Booksellers," said to have been the first of the kind in America. Its objects were commercial and social, and those who refused to abide by its rules lost the advantage of exchange of books and trade discounts, so essential to a successful business. In 1804 they published a catalogue of books in print in America. The Boston Directory for 1807 mentions fifteen booksellers and three librarians. Booksellers were quick also to see the need of circulating libraries to draw the public to their places of business.

In this summary I have not referred to many social clubs which stimulated thought and study, such as the Friday Evening Club to which many of the gentlemen mentioned above gave their attention."

The clergymen and physicians were closely associated in these many literary enterprises, while the lawyers contented themselves largely with founding the Social Law Library. Of those who instituted the Monthly Anthology, a magazine, and the Boston Athenæum, which followed, the Rev. Dr. Kirkland was associated also with the Boston Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Theological Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Mr. Emerson was identified with all but the Academy; while Dr. John C. Warren, the Rev. Joseph McKean, the Rev. James Freeman, the Rev. John Eliot, William Tudor, and others were connected with several of those institutions.

On behalf of Mr. CHARLES S. RACKEMANN, Mr. EDES communicated a Memoir of FRANCIS VERGNIES BALCH, which Mr. Rackemann had been requested to prepare for publication in the Transactions.

1 Shaw's Description of Boston, p. 278.

2 See Life of John C. Warren, i. 79. Members were Col. George Gibbs, President Holley, Dr. James Jackson, the Rev. Joseph S. Buckminster, Benjamin Vaughan, and Francis C. Gray.

MEMOIR

OF

FRANCIS VERGNIES BALCH, LL.B.

BY

CHARLES SEDGWICK RACKEMANN

FRANCIS VERGNIES BALCH, the subject of this memoir, was descended directly and in the eighth generation from John Balch, who came from Somersetshire, England, and, after having been for four years in Dorchester, settled in 1630 in the "Bass River District" of what is now Beverly, was then Salem, and was originally Naumkeag. He was one of the first settlers of Beverly. With him had come also Roger Conant, John Woodberry, and Peter Palfrey, and these four men were known as "the Old Planters."

His father was Joseph Balch, who became one of the pioneers in the establishment of fire insurance companies in Massachusetts, and lived for many years at Jamaica Plain, which in those days was a section of the town of West Roxbury, though long since (in 1874) made a part of the present City of Boston.

Mr. Balch's mother was Anne Lothrop Noyes, of Newburyport, and she was descended directly, and in the eighth generation, from Nicholas Noyes, who settled in Newbury in 1635.

Thus for more than two hundred years his ancestors had lived in the Colony, Province, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and had become "bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh."

Mr. Balch was born in Boston on February 3, 1839, in a house on LaGrange Place. Most of his childhood was passed at Jamaica Plain, and there he attended for a time the school kept by Miss Jane Lane, who was a sister of our late honored associate, Professor George Martin Lane. Afterwards he went to the boarding-school of his own brother-in-law, Stephen Minot Weld, and thence entered

the freshman class of Harvard College while yet in his seventeenth year. As a child he was rather feeble, and his friends did not look with much confidence upon the comparatively small prospect of his being able to finish his course at college. Not only did he do that, but he did it with the utmost credit to his scholarship and with comfort and happiness for himself. He soon afterwards wrote:

I never expect to spend four years again so happily as I have done these four, but I have the consolation of knowing that I knew what I was enjoying all the time, and made the most of it. That my life here has been so pleasant is entirely owing to the friendships which I have made, and to the kindness of my classmates.

While in college he had distinguished himself by his high rank and by winning sundry honors, both from his classmates and from the authorities. He was president of the class; he obtained a second prize for an English essay; and he was both class-day orator and valedictorian. It is related of him that at this time he deliberately tried to lower his own rank in scholarship, so little was he desirous of accumulating honors for himself, and so generously disposed to share them with others.

One of our associates and his classmate, the Rev. Dr. William R. Huntington, has remarked:

It is seldom that the authorities of a college and the undergraduates are of one mind with respect to the merits of a particular student, but in Balch's case there was no difference of opinion. The faculty declared him the first scholar of his year and his classmates chose him for their

orator.

Another classmate, James Schouler, speaking of the same period,

says:

Respect for his attainments and modest worth caused him to be chosen almost spontaneously the class orator, at a time when college politics were somewhat bitter, and though not a man of brilliant parts he acquitted himself well and earnestly, as he did on every other occasion of life.

He graduated in 1859 in a class that contained a large number of men who became especially prominent in life, and of which the late Professor Child wrote: "The class of 1859; a very distinguished

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