obably did him good; he needed a little
discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with
it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer
Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or
equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors
before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the
Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, an
American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which must
have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify
him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not
wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable
writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the keeping of that
venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load
that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making
a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept
in sight.

It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship I
had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with demolition;
a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked
hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first
Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the
duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which
would have been otherwise expended in filling it.

During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the
greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and
opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
member.

In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had
the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips &
Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought
that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not
unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle,
which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness,
and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the
new