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.