“
from the robust thirty of the year before. The spacious classroom on the second floor of Boston’s towering new Masonic temple, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott arrayed in its four corners, was beginning to look empty in the weak winter sunlight that filtered through its single enormous Palladian window. The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of Conversations appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.” The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.
”
”