ABSTRACT
It was in the seventies that good taste reached its lowest ebb. The welter of the seventies it looked upon with undisguised contempt. It was as native to New England as Boston brown bread, and it issued in self-respecting and dignified character. New England was visibly falling into decay and the years of its intellectual leadership in America were numbered. In the expansive days of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain the official custodian of the genteel in letters was Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who as editor of the Atlantic from 1881 to 1890 sturdily combated all literary leveling. But it was Walt Whitman in his den at Camden—culturally and in the things of the spirit countless leagues removed from Boston—who was the completest embodiment of the Enlightenment—the poet and prophet of a democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying. Clearly in Mark Twain's philosophy of history the hopes of the Enlightenment are fading.
