nd 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.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The type of the monthly periodical was fixed when Edward Cave, in 1731,
founded in London _The Gentleman's Magazine_. Ten years later, and at
the very time that Samuel Johnson, at St. John's Gate, was preparing for
"Sylvanus Urban, Esq.," the reports of the parliamentary debates,
Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford issued in Philadelphia the first
monthly magazines in America.

These two magazines appear to have been conceived in jealousy and
brought forth in anger. In the _Philadelph