01, the publication of the
_Port Folio_, by Oliver Oldschool, Esq., the best of Philadelphia
magazines, which he continued to edit until his death, in 1812. Dennie's
strong personality and engaging qualities of mind and heart attracted
attention, and made him many friends. With genuine editorial tact and
skill he drew to himself all the literary ability of the city, which was
then "the largest and most literary and most intellectually accomplished
city in the Union," to quote the words of a later editor of the _Port
Folio_, Dr. Charles Caldwell. There was scarcely a more picturesque
figure in Philadelphia in the first decade of this century than that
presented by the editor of the _Port Folio_. It would be necessary to go
to London and to Oliver Goldsmith to find another to outshine this
Oliver Oldschool as Buckingham saw him slipping along Chestnut Street to
his office "in a pea-green coat, white vest, nankeen small-clothes,
white silk stockings and pumps, fastened with silver buckles which
covered at least half the foot from the instep to the toe." Dennie was
but 44 years of age when he died; Buckingham says he was "a premature
victim to social indulgence." Those were the days of hard drinking and
of high thinking. Nothing so frugal as a cup of Madeira and a cold
capon's leg would satisfy Dennie's epicurean soul. He was a social
creature, and those _noctes ambrosianae_ of the Tuesday Club when Tom
Moore, who celebrated the club in his eighth epistle, or some other
lover of Anacreon was the guest, were often kept up until it was too
late to go to bed. Wine songs and Martial-like epigrams of pointed
indecencies are correspondingly brisk and plentiful in the pages of the
_Port Folio_.

In the introduction to the magazine Dennie stated that the word _Port
Folio_ was not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and proceeded to
define it as "a portable repository for fugitive papers." "Editors," he
continued, slyly satirizing his contemporaries, "ambitious of sonorous
or brilliant titles, frequently select a name not intimately connected
with the nature of their work. We hear of the _Mirror_ and the _Aurora_;
but what relation has a literary essay with a _polished plane of glass_,
or what has politics to do with the _morning_?[11]" The editor began with
a "lilliputian page" because he was warned by "the waywardness of the
time." "A waywardness which," he explains, "alludes to our indifference
to elegant letters, the acrimony o