SOURCE: The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and his New York Friends, Cornell University Press, 1952, pp. 14-21.

In the following excerpt, Cary discusses Taylor's egotism and the effect it had on his work and on his role as a leader of the Genteel Tradition.

With complete justice Russell Blankenship calls Bayard Taylor “the crown prince of the Genteel Tradition under the benign despotism of the First Triumvirate, Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes.”¹ In Taylor may be descried all the traits of the romantic-sentimental school which culminates in a carefully cultivated academic isolationism despite its pretenses to rugged worldliness and manliness. His achievement was an inspiration to his three comrades, his popularity their hope, his sturdiness their rock in time of trouble. [Richard Henry] Stoddard, most clamorously self-sufficient of the four, paid Taylor this tribute after his death, “My nature is not a reverent one, I fear, but I looked up...