Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[66] going down hill. He had for assistant writers John Quincy Adams, whose Letters from Silesia first appeared there, after being published in London in 1800, and Charles Brockden Brown, the so-called “Father of American fiction,” of whom we shall presently speak. Reading these volumes now, one finds with surprise that they go beyond similar periodicals even at the present day, in the variety of sources whence their cultivation came. The Portfolio translates portions of Voltaire's Henriade; recognizes the fact that fresh intellectual activity has just begun in England; quotes early poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, sometimes without giving the names, showing the editors to have been attracted by the poems themselves apart from the author. There is no want of color in the criticism. German books are apt to be found rather abhorrent to the Philadelphia critic, which is not surprising when we remember that it was the age of Kotzebue, whose travels it burlesques and who drives the editor into this extraordinary outburst: “The rage for German literature is one of the foolish and uncouth whims of the time and ”