520 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
voice of this unique group. The "Saints and Sinners" were a score of bibliophiles clergymen, general readers, and literary workers who held meetings, imaginary for the most part, in the rare-book corner of the retail department of the house of A. C. McClurg & Co., from another section of which, as we have seen, there emanated a journal of literary criticism. It was really a corner in the Daily News, where Field had a column devoted to gossip about "The Saints and Sinners," and local literary and artistic topics, under the caption " Sharps and Flats." This was widely read and had a great effect on the ideas of the community. From it, in 1887, Field culled selections, which were published in book-form by Ticknor & Co., of Boston, under the title: Culture's Garland Being Memoranda of the Gradual Rise of Literature, Music and Society in Chicago, and Other Western Ganglia.
The garland with which Field wreathed Chicago culture, as shown in a frontispiece, was a string of sausages. He rhade a reference to the time " when Chicago's output of pork swept the last prop from under the old Elizabethan school at Cincinnati ; " and said, on p. 168:
Here in Chicago " a hand well known in literature " is a horny, warty but honest hand which, after years of patient toil at skinning cattle, or at boiling lard, or at cleaning pork, has amassed sufficient to admit of its mas- ter's reception into the creme de la creme of Chicago culture. Besides the extreme expression of satirical criticism which he gave to sham in literary patronage, Field also played with super- ficiality in efforts at literary and artistic production, including some fun at the expense of three ambitious literary periodicals started in Chicago during the decade. All this was the expres- sion of an attitude that is typical of metropolitan centers, and which in older, cosmopolitan capitals attains a degree of frigid or flippant cynicism never yet reached by Chicago.
The three periodicals noticed by Field, while not devoted to satire, were more metropolitan in character than any which had preceded them in the succession of those started in Chicago. These were the Current, a weekly begun in 1883 and lasting until 1888 ; Literary Life, a monthly magazine, 1884-87 ; and America, a literary and political weekly journal, 1888-91.
