To relate the history of the Philadelphia magazines is to tell the story of Philadelphia literature. The story is not a stately nor a splendid one, but it is exceedingly instructive. It helps to exhibit the process of American literature as an evolution, and it illustrates perilous and important chapters in American history. For a hundred years Pennsylvania was the seat of the ripest culture in America. The best libraries were to be found here, and the earliest and choicest reprints of Latin and English classics were made here. James Logan, a man of gentle nature and a scholar of rare attainments, had gathered at Stenton a library that comprehended books "so scarce that neither price nor prayers could purchase them." John Davis, the satirical English traveller, who said of Princeton that it was "a place more famous for its college than its learning," did justice, despite of his own nature, to Logan and to Philadelphia when he wrote: "The Greek and Roman authors, forgotten on their native banks of the Ilissus and Tiber, delight by the kindness of a Logan the votaries to learning on those of the Delaware." The eagerness of Philadelphia social circles for each new thing in literature enabled booksellers to import large supplies from England and to undertake splendid editions of notable books. Dr. Johnson was made to feel amiable for a moment toward America on being presented with a copy of Rasselas bearing a Philadelphia imprint.

The first American editions of Shakespeare and of Milton, of "Pamela" and of "The Vicar of Wakefield" were printed in Philadelphia. In the same city, in 1805, Aristotle's "Ethics" and "Politics" were published for the first time in America. A little later came the costly "Columbiad" and the great volumes of Alexander Wilson. Robert Aitken, at the Pope's Head, issued the first English Bible in America in 1782, and his daughter, Jane, printed Charles Thomson's translation of the Septuagint in four superb volumes in 1808. Robert Bell successfully compiled Blackstone's Commentaries in 1772, "a stupendous enterprise." Bell did much by his good taste and untiring industry to advance the literary culture of the city. "The more books are sold," he declared in one of his broadsides, "the more will be sold, is an established Truth well known to every liberal reader, and to every bookseller of experience. For the sale of one book propagateth the sale of another with as much certainty as the possession of one guinea helpeth to the possession of another."

"The Philadelphiad" (1784) gives us a glimpse of the motley society that loitered in Bell's Third Street shop.

"Just by St. Paul's, where dry divines rehearse,
Bell keeps his store for vending prose and verse,
And books that's neither—for no age nor clime,
Lame, languid prose, begot on hobb'ling ryme.
Here authors meet who ne'er a sprig have got,
The poet, player, doctor, wit and sot;
Smart politicians wrangling here are seen
Condemning Jeffries or indulging spleen,
Reproving Congress or amending laws,
Still fond to find out blemishes and flaws;
Here harmless sentimental-mongers join
To praise some author or his wit refine,
Or treat the mental appetite with lore
From Plato's, Pope's, and Shakespeare's endless store;
Young blushing writers, eager for the bays,
Try here the merit of their new-born lays,
Seek for a patron, follow fleeting fame,
And beg the slut may raise their hidden name."

The Philadelphia magazines, from Franklin's to Graham's, furnished ample opportunities for "young blushing writers eager for the bays." Their articles, it is true, were often a kind of yeasty collection of fond and winnowed opinions, but among these shallow fopperies there would at times be heard a strain of higher mood. Nor is the story of these magazines altogether without its pathos. American writers, after the Revolution which lost England her colonies, felt themselves to be under the opprobrium of the literary world. They felt keenly the sneers of English men-of-letters, and winced under injustice and invective that they were not strong enough to resent. The insolence of British travellers was especially provoking. J. N. Williams, a Philadelphian, stung by some offensive criticism by a wandering Englishman, wrote, "America looked not for a spy upon the sanctity of her household gods in the stranger that sat within her gates; she scarce supposed that the hand of a clumsy servant like the claws of the harpies could utterly mar and defile the feast which honest hospitality had provided."

The Port Folio, in 1810, was moved indignantly to declare that foreign critics grounded their strictures "upon the tales of some miserable reptiles who, after having abused the hospitality and patience of this country, levy a tax from their own by disseminating a vile mass of falsehood and nonsense under the denomination of Travels through the United States."

Sydney Smith waved American literature contemptuously aside in the Edinburgh Review. The Quarterly was brutal in its attacks upon timid transatlantic books. William Godwin reproached American ignorance, and proceeded to locate Philadelphia upon the Chesapeake Bay. No wonder that the Port Folio exclaimed in 1810, "The fastidious arrogance with which the reviewers and magazine makers of Great Britain treat the genius and intellect of this country is equalled by nothing but their profound ignorance of its situation."

The insolence of Great Britain affected American writers in two ways. Some it stung into violent hatred or sullen antagonism, others it coerced into timid imitation and servility. Upon Dennie and his associates it had the latter effect, and the Port Folio vigorously resisted all "Americanisms" in politics and in letters, and sought to conciliate England and to win the coveted stamp of English approbation by unlimited adulation of the favorites of the hour. "To study with a view of becoming an author by profession in America," wrote Dennie, "is a prospect of no less flattering promise than to publish among the Esquimaux an essay on delicacy of taste, or to found an academy of sciences in Lapland."

Upon Brackenridge and Paine the truculent criticisms of England acted as a lively stimulus, and they went profanely to work "to resent the British scoff that when separated from England the colonies would become mere illiterate ourang-outangs."

Thomas Green Fessenden, one of the contributors to the Farmers' Weekly Museum, and to Dennie's Port Folio, wrote in the preface to his "Original Poems" (Philadelphia, 1806), "Although the war, which terminated in a separation of the two nations, inflicted wounds which, it is to be feared, still rankle, yet the more considerate of both countries have long desired (if I may be allowed a transatlantic simile) that the hatchet of animosity might be buried in the grave of oblivion" (page 6). A little further on he confesses his timidity, when, speaking of the political leaders at home, he says, "I could have enlarged on the demerits of these political impostors, but I feared I might disgust the English reader by such exhibitions of human depravity" (p. 7).

A serener voice is that of John Blair Linn, brother-in-law of Charles Brockden Brown, who was not out of love with his nativity, nor accustomed to disable the benefits of his country. In his "Powers of Genius," which was beautifully reprinted in England, we read:

The Philadelphia writers had their own little thrills, and their own little ambitions, and amid the poverty of their intellectual surroundings they refreshed themselves with visions of the giant things to come at large. James Hall, in his "Letters from the West," wrote: "The vicinity of Pittsburg may one day wake the lyre of the Pennsylvanian bard to strains as martial and as sweet as Scott; ... believe me, I should tread with as much reverence over the mausoleum of a Shawanee chief, as among the catacombs of Egypt, and would speculate with as much delight upon the site of an Indian village as in the gardens of Tivoli, or the ruins of Herculaneum."

American critics soon caught the contagion of sneering censure, and caused the Port Folio to say, in 1811: "American critics seem, in almost all cases, to have entered into a confederacy to exterminate American poetry. If an individual has the temerity to jingle a couplet, and to avow himself descended from Americans, the offence is absolutely unpardonable." When Fenimore Cooper published his first novel, he suppressed his name and wrote instead, "Precaution, by an Englishman."

Still, a notable feature of the American magazines was a general insistence upon or, perhaps, a preference for subjects out of American history, or articles dealing with what might be called American archÆology—sketches of the life and character of "the ancients of these lands"—or, at least, contributions that were tricked out in some local garb or color. The minds of young American writers turned with alacrity to the subjects that lay nearest to them and which were intimately connected with the life of the country. A national literature was never altogether absent from their thoughts, however the fear of English censure or ridicule may have checked the aspiration. John Webbe, in his prospectus to the first American magazine, said that the new venture would be "an attempt to erect on neutral principles a publick theatre in the centre of the British Empire in America" (Amer. Weekly Mercury, October 30, 1740).

A discussion of the Philadelphia magazines takes us back to a time when Philadelphia led all the cities of the country in culture, in commerce, in statecraft and in authorship. Every new experiment in literature was first tried in Philadelphia. Her's was the first monthly magazine (January, 1741), and her's, too, the first daily newspaper (Amer. Daily Advertiser, December 21, 1784). The first religious magazine was Sauer's Geistliches Magazien (1764)—for which Christopher Sauer cast his own type, the first made in America—and the first religious weekly was The Religious Remembrancer (September 4, 1813). Philadelphia led off with the first penny paper (The Cent) in 1830; and the first mathematical journal (The Annulus), and the first Juvenile Magazine (1802), and the first illustrated comical paper on an original plan, The John Donkey, in 1848, were all Philadelphia adventures.

There is scarcely a notable name in the literature of America that is not in some way connected with the Philadelphia magazines. Dennie and Brown, the first professional men-of-letters on this continent, were Philadelphia editors. Washington Irving edited the Analectic Magazine. James Russell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe and Bayard Taylor were editorial writers on Graham's Magazine, and John Greenleaf Whittier edited The Pennsylvania Freeman.

Bryant and Cooper and Longfellow and Hawthorne and a hundred lesser men were constant contributors to the Philadelphia journals.

A striking difference between the older magazines and the recent ones is the conspicuous absence from the journal of a century ago of what is commonly called "light literature." Magazines were then conducted by scholars for scholars. "Popular" essays and silly novels had not yet depraved the taste of readers who could relish Somerville and Shenstone, Savage and Johnson. Articles appeared monthly in the Port Folio that could not by any chance win recognition from an editor of these days. One of the favorite amusements of the Port Folio gentlemen was the translation of Mother Goose melodies and alliterative nursery rhymes into Latin, and especially into Greek. These curious translations, in which the object was to preserve in the Greek, as far as possible, the verbal eccentricities of "butter blue beans" and other intricate verses of infantile memory, are scattered up and down the pages of the Port Folio, together with fresh versions of Horace and dissertations upon classical rhetoric.

But the curtain has fallen on all this scholastic bravery. The dust of a dry antiquity has settled upon the laborious pages of these ragged tomes, undisturbed save by some "local grubber," or by some "illustrator" in search of portraits for a rich man's library.

Magazines increase and fill the demand of the public, but they are not cut upon the ancient pattern. The gradual accumulation of books about books, of criticisms on both, of reviews of the critics, of newspaper accounts of the reviews, of weekly summaries of the newspapers, seems to be carrying us ever further from the face of reality into a mere commerce of ideas on which no healthy soul can live.