ine Sedgwick.
Three years before (1828) he had become the chief editor of the _Evening
Post_. Associated with him was Mr. Leggett, who had shown some talent as
a writer of sketches and stories, and who had failed, like himself, in
conducting a critical publication, for which his countrymen were not
ready. He made a second collection of his poems at this time (1832), a
copy of which was sent by Mr. Verplanck to Mr. Washington Irving, who
was then, what he had been for years, the idol of English readers, and
not without weight with the Trade. Would he see if some English house
would not reprint it? No leading publisher nibbled at it, not even
Murray, who was Mr. Irving's publisher; but an obscure bookseller named
Andrews finally agreed to undertake it, if Mr. Irving would put his
valuable name on the title-page as the editor. He was not acquainted
with Mr. Bryant, but he was a kind-hearted, large-souled gentleman, who
knew good poetry when he saw it, and he consented to "edit" the book. He
was not a success in the estimation of Andrews, who came to him one day,
by no means a merry Andrew, and declared that the book would ruin him
unless one or more changes were made in the text. What was amiss in it?
He turned to the "Song of Marion's Men," and stumbled over an obnoxious
couplet in the first stanza:

"The British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told."

"That won't do at all, you know." The absurdity of the objection must
have struck the humorist comically; but as he wanted the volume
republished, he good-naturedly saved the proverbial valor of the British
soldier by changing the first line to

"The foeman trembles in his camp,"

and the tempest in a teapot was over, as far as England was concerned.
Not as far as the United States was concerned, however; for when the
circumstance became known to Mr. Leggett, he excoriated Mr. Irving for
his subserviency to a bloated aristocracy, and so forth. Mr. John Wilson
reviewed the book in _Blackwood's Magazine_ in a half-hearted way,
patronizing the writer with his praise.

The poems that Mr. Bryant wrote during the first seven years of his
residence in New York (some forty in number, not including translations)
exhibited the qualities which distinguished his genius from the
beginning, and were marked by characteristics which were rather acquired
than inherited. In other words, they were somewhat different from those
which were written at Great Barrington. The Hel