th, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as
the section was isolated {535} more and more from the rest of the Union
and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary
prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing
can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical
editorials in the southern press just before the outbreak of the war,
or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews
in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.

In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two
southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done
something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in
1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred
dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the
prize to Poe's first story, the MS. _Found in a Bottle_, was John P.
Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became Secretary
of the Navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had
published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country
life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels,
_Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the
Revolutionary War in South Carolina; the latter an historical tale of
colonial Maryland. These had sufficient 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 {536} 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 s