The freshness, beauty, and ability of Graham’s Magazine at once placed it before all others in the popular favor, and though its rivals hastened to imitate the example it had set, it continued to maintain, and maintains to this day, the supremacy.
The success of Mr. Graham’s Magazine was such, that, by January, 1842, it had attained a circulation of more than thirty thousand. Meantime no expense was spared to increase its excellence, both literary and pictorial. Mr. Sartain, the celebrated engraver, was kept busily employed in furnishing mezzotints for it: and some of the engravings then executed by that artist, and by Smillie, Rawdon and Tucker, have certainly never been since surpassed. The most eminent authors in the United States were, at the same time, sought for its pages. At first, these writers were incredulous that any American magazine could afford them adequate remuneration; but the success which had already attended Mr. Graham’s improvements convinced him that the public would sustain him in his effort to raise the character of our periodical literature, and accordingly he persevered in his design. No sooner were Longfellow, Bryant, Cooper, and others of our leading authors, discovered to be permanent contributors to Graham’s Magazine, than thousands, who had heretofore looked with contempt on an American monthly, hastened with their subscriptions, to encourage the enterprising publisher. The benefit thus done to popular literature cannot be calculated. But it was such that it will be long, perhaps, before any one man will have it in his power to do again as much.
The demand of a large business, and the watchfulness necessary to keep the lead, left Mr. Graham but little time for literary composition. He had, however, increased his own reputation as a writer, of occasional articles contributed to his newspaper and magazine, but principally to the latter. Thoroughly read in Bolingbroke, Addison, Burke, and others of the classic authors of the language, his style was distinguished by a finish, yet an idiomatic force such as is rarely found among the careless writers of the day. A clear, sound thinker; with a fervid imagination; possessing a keen sense of the ridiculous; and having a great command over the resources of language, he always wrote to the point, in a racy, nervous style, mingling eloquence and satire by turns, and never, as hackneyed writers so often do, drowning the idea with “excess of words.” His choice of terms was singularly felicitous. He wrote the language as the translators of the Bible wrote it, with a large mixture of Saxon derivations, yet with purity. In invective, as in sarcasm, he was especially powerful. A series of editorial articles contributed to the newspaper under his management, and still remembered, are instances of the former: his letters to Jeremy Short, are examples of the latter. In a word, as a terse, and even eloquent writer, Mr. Graham holds a high rank. As a critic his judgment is always generous, but just.