That crowd of clever men and women who now write for the magazines, who
send out volumes of essays, sketches, and poems, and who supply the press
with novels, biographies, and historical works, were then, for the most
part, either stammering their lessons in the schools, or yet unborn. Yet
it is worthy of note, that just about the time that the _Spy_ made its
appearance, the dawn of what we now call our literature was just breaking.
The concluding number of Dana's _Idle Man_, a work neglected at first, but
now numbered among the best things of the kind in our language, was issued
in the same month. The _Sketch Book_ was then just completed; the world
was admiring it, and its author was meditating _Bracebridge Hall_. Miss
Sedgwick, about the same time, made her first essay in that charming
series of novels of domestic life in New England, which have gained her so
high a reputation. Percival, now unhappily silent, had just put to press a
volume of poems. I have a copy of an edition of Hallock's _Fanny_,
published in the same year; the poem of _Yamoyden,_ by Eastburn and Sands,
appeared almost simultaneously with it. Livingston was putting the
finishing hand to his _Report on the Penal Code of Louisiana,_ a work
written with such grave, persuasive eloquence, that it belongs as much to
our literature as to our jurisprudence. Other contemporaneous American
works there were, now less read. Paul Allen's poem of _Noah_ was just laid
on the counters of the booksellers. Arden published, at the same time, in
this city, a translation of Ovid's _Tristia_, in heroic verse, in which
the complaints of the effeminate Roman poet were rendered with great
fidelity to the original, and sometimes not without beauty. If I may speak
of myself, it was in that year that I timidly intrusted to the winds and
waves of public opinion a small cargo of my own--a poem entitled _The
Ages,_ and half a dozen shorter ones, in a thin duodecimo volume, printed
at Cambridge.

We had, at the same time, works of elegant literature, fresh from the