George Frisbie Whicher

“ Wirt’s natural charm of manner survived only in his playful private letters. [7] Nothing of permanent mark came from the facile pen of William Crafts, editor of the Charleston Courier, and the ornate prose of Hugh Swinton Legare is that of the scholar rather than of the familiar essayist.
New York and Philadelphia were comparatively free from the blight of theology and the bane of eloquence, though the latter city seems to have suffered from a constitutional profundity which even Dennie could not entirely overcome. It gave to the world nothing better than the Didactics of Robert Walsh. ”

“ Joseph Dennie. Perhaps the most successful “American Addison” was Joseph Dennie (1768–1812) , who was “reasonably tinged with literature” while resisting a Harvard education, and after a short trial of the law, devoted his desultory talents to periodical writing until his death. He kindled the first sparks of a reputation by the Farrago essays, contributed to various country newspapers, but his Tablet, a hopeful weekly paper devoted to belles lettres, failed to set Boston ablaze. Yankee readers objected to his exercises in the manner of Goldsmith and Addision as “sprightly rather than moral”. ”

“ Paulding wrote few essays except the unremarkable Odds and Ends contributed in his old age to The Literary World, but in his Letters from the South, in his tales and novels, [9] and even in his prose satires he found opportunities to manifest his delight in American scenes. Unlike Irving, he never travelled, and the beauties of his native land remained in his eyes unrivalled. ”

“ But more popular in this country were Characteristics of Literature and Essays, Biographical and Critical, which illustrate various types of genius by little biographies of representative men. Addison, for instance, appeared—with no reference to Dennie—as the Lay Preacher. Many introductions, magazine articles on literature, and two books on American artists gave evidence of Tuckerman’s critical versatility. ”

“ Nor is it needful to distinguish the paste from the genuine in the composition of the man himself; to defend him from the charge of puppyism by insisting upon his kindliness to younger authors. All that concerns us here is to indicate in what ways Willis inaugurated a temporary but essential phase in the development of the essay and indeed of American letters. ”

“ Johnson’s advice to fashion his prose style on the model of Addison, Franklin anticipated also the practice of American essay-writers for more than a generation. Like Franklin’s Dogood Paper, the first essays printed in colonial newspapers were written with a conscious moral purpose. ”

“ David Graham of Pittsburg, “it is impossible to give interest and standing popularity, to a periodical essay paper, constructed upon the model of the British Essayist, in an infant country.” [2] Even in the populous cities “where the inhabitants amount of several thousand” there was little interest in the art of living. ”

“ The commercial interests of Manhattan could claim little attention from young men of wit and spirit, but leisure and a society both cosmopolitan and congenial afforded them ample opportunity and provocation for literary jeux d’esprit. ”

“ Jaunty and impermanent as the society it portrayed, his pages yet contain the most valuable deposit left by what Professor Beers has happily called the “Albuminous Age” of American literature. [14]
§ 7. Henry Theodore Tuckerman. A more reserved, though hardly less voluminous writer than Willis, was the critic, biographer, and essayist, Henry Theodore Tuckerman, born in Boston in 1813 and from 1845 until his death in 1871 a resident of New York. As a young man he twice spent a year or two abroad, of which the fruits were an Italian Sketch Book in 1835 and several other volumes of travel. ”

“ The Idle Man was printed in New York, and it was there, naturally enough, that the vein opened by Irving and Paulding in Salmagundi was most consistently followed by writers of the Knickerbocker group, many of them contributors at one time or another to Colonel Morris’s New York Mirror. From that paper Thedore Sedgwick Fay, better known as the author of sucessful but mediocre novels, clipped enough of his occasional writings to fill two volumes entitled Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man (1832) . Save for the lively satire of the Little Genius essays and a delicious travesty of Mrs. ”