icient success to warrant reprinting
as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern
writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who
died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of
Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the
best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was
an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys'
books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly
Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City
Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings
include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses,
and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote
numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of
the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there
illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and
Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong
_Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best
Southern novel produced before the civil war.

When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous literary figure of the
metropolis, with the possible exception of Bryant and Halleck, was N.
P. Willis, one of the editors of the _Evening Mirror_, upon which
journal Poe was for a time engaged. Willis had made a literary
reputation, when a student at Yale, by his _Scripture Poems_, written
in smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the _American Monthly_
in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had published
_Pencillings by the Way_, 1835, a pleasant record of European
saunterings; _Inklings of Adventure_, 1836, a collection of dashing
stories and sketches of American and foreign life; and _Letters from
Under a Bridge_, 1839, a series of charming rural letters from his
country place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always
graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in
substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of
popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the most
successful American magazinist, and even down to the day of his death,
in 1867, he retained his hold upon the attention of the fashionable
public by his easy paragraphing and correspondence in the _Mirror_ and
its successor, the _Home Journal_, which catered to the l