History of Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts, including Lynnfield ...

130 Biographical Sketches. Clapp.
ever known. Not long ago Ada Clare, the " Queen of Bohemia," died a vicftim
of that strange malady, hydrophobia, and the rest of the colony that once met at
Pfaff's beer saloon, on Broadway, to enliven the midnight hour with songs and jokes
and reckless repartee, are either dead or dispersed, or turned respeftable. The
most brilliant lights went out some years ago, when George Arnold and Fitz James
O'Brien died, and Clapp retired from the Bohemian throne. Others are still living,
but the haunts that once knew them know them no more. There is Walt Whitman,
a confirmed invalid ;
" Doestick" still lives, but the uniflion of his humor has passed
with the increasing obesity of his body ; Ned House is in Japan, conne6led with the
educational department of the government ; and Willie Winter has subsided into a
taciturn and sedate, though bright and vigorous critic. There were women in Bohemia
besides Ada Clare. There was Jenny Danforth, who is dead, or in obscurity
almost as complete as death ; Dora Shaw, who claimed the authorship of " Beautiful
Snow," but could not maintain the doubtful honor ; and Mary Fox, still lively and
sharp-witted, the " M. H. B." of the St. Louis Republican. But then Bohemia is
completely dead, though there are Bohemians enough of a straggling sort in Gotham
yet, God wot. But the Bohemia over which Clapp presided, the bright, witty and
wicked circle of writers in the basement beer saloon, whose quips and cranks were
as sparkling and as evanescent as the foam on their glasses, is a thing of the past.
It required a peculiar genius to call together and keep together such a company,
and its existence and its opportunity are not likely to occur again in the present
generation.
The life of Henry Clapp was a strange one.
his early life was a sailor.
He was born in Nantucket, and in
Afterwards he appeared as a temperance lefturer and an
ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery, travelling extensively in the cause
of reform. He was for some time in Paris, and after his return he made translations
of some of the prominent socialistic works of Fourier. His first journalistic experience
was in editing an anti-slavery paper in Lynn, but he was best known as the
founder of the "Saturday Press," and "Vanity Fair," in New York. Both of these
were too bright and too impracticable to last. Many of the brightest of the Bohemians
were contributors to Vanity Fair, but all their wit could not keep it alive. Clapp
afterwards became well known as " Figaro " of the Lander, a paper at one time
owned and edited by Mayor Hall, and latterly he obtained a precarious livelihood
by writing paragraphs for the Daily Graphic and sending occasional contributions to
dramatic and musical journals from a New Jersey farm-house. His talent was
essentially that of the French F'euilletonistes, bright, keen and witty, but unsubstantial
and ephemeral. In character he was of the essence of Bohemia, reckless
and witty, caring and thinking little of the serious concerns of life, but living as those
who say, " Let us eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." That to-morrow
of death has come for tienry Clapp, and no one can have the heart to throw anything
but the mantle of charity over his bier.
There would, perhaps, be little reason for introducing Mr,
Clapp in this connexion, were it not that he played so conspicuous
and sensational a part while here. He fraternized with the
" Comeouters," though guiltless of the extremes that chara61:erized
the condu6l of some of the earlier ones, as noticed in our
Annals, under date 1841. And it may be pardonable to add that
the writer was well acquainted with him, and in common with