eracy 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
archaeology--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 a