Holograph poem by the Harvard-educated lawyer George Stillman Hillard, Attorney General of Massachusetts, titled 'To the Friday Club'. With engraved portrait of Hillard.

3pp., 12mo. A fair copy. Very good, on lightly-aged paper. The twenty-eight-line poem is arranged in seven four-line stanzas, with Hillard's firm signature and the date at the end. The poem begins with unintentional, but no less curious, sexual overtones: 'The rod of Aaron, severed long | From its ancestral bowers, | Felt in its veins the sap of youth, | And shone with buds of flowers. | The rigid staff, smoothworn and dry, | In living green was dressed. | And wild bees hummed above the spot | The old man's hand had pressed.' Together with a photographic engraving, 9 x 11.5cm, on paper 16 x 24cm, of a portrait of a bearded Hillard in late middle-age, with facsimile of his signature beneath the image. In an address given at the University of Virginia in 1883, William Cabell Rives describes William Barton Rogers' membership in Boston of 'a select club, known as the Friday Club. Among the members of that club, besides himself, were such men as the thoroughly informed and sparkling Amory, the cultured Hillard, the learned Ticknor, the scholarly Felton, the logical and profound Curtis, the genial, enthusiastic, world-renowned Agassiz'.