poet of "The Battle of Life," which was a kind
of literary salon of its day, where Poe once read aloud the newly
published "Raven," and where Bayard Taylor visited, and Taylor's friend
Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Child, and Ann S.
Stephens, who wrote "Fashion and Famine" and "Mary Derwent," and young
Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Barstow, who became his wife. Not
far from the Lynch house was the humble dwelling in which Poe wrote "The
Fall of the House of Usher."

Just off the Square, at 21 Washington Place, Henry Jones was born. In a
house that once stood at the northwest corner Bayard Taylor lived for a
time and wrote the "Epistle from Mount Tmolus," and some of the "Poems
of the Orient." In later days a large apartment house grew up on the
site, and there George Parsons Lathrop dwelt, and penned some of the
verse of his "Days and Dreams," while his wife, the daughter of the
author of "The Scarlet Letter," composed portions of "Along the Shore."
In the old University building on the east side of the Square Theodore
Winthrop--later as Colonel Winthrop to meet a soldier's death at Big
Bethel--wrote "John Brent," and the famous but utterly dreary "Cecil
Dreeme," and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more
modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years
of their pseudo-Bohemia. Across the Square N.P. Willis, the town's crack
descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one
occasion with sorry results. The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his
path and fell upon him with vigorous assault. Bystanders were on the
point of intervening. "Stand back, gentlemen!" cried the Thespian. "He
has interfered in my domestic affairs." And he proceeded with the
whacking.

Not only the Square, but the side streets below Fourteenth, must be
taken into a consideration of the old literary landmarks and figures of
Fifth Avenue. Thackeray was only one of the foreign authors visiting
America who found ease and comfort in the club-house of the Century in
Clinton Place. In the same thoroughfare lived and died Evert Augustus
Duyckinck, co-author with his brother George of the "Cyclopedia of
American Literature," and author of "The War for the Union"; and Mrs.
Botta, the Anne Lynch of earlier mention, had for a time a home there;
and in the street Richard Watson Gilder dwelt later, and in No. 33, in a
third-story back room, a young clerk named Thomas Bailey Al