g
each other in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust
to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of
the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use.
His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little
discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came
with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble
writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental
pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three
survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest
son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey,
an American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which
must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot
identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last
Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright
and agreeable writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the
keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and
hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to
his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to
them so long as he is kept in sight.

It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship
I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with demolition;
a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked
hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first
Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the
duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought
which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.

During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for
the greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up
and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
member.

In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had
the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips
& Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought
that I might bring something out of my old Po