After this there can be no doubt that the useful notes to the 1807 edition, signed "J. D.," are from the pen of Joseph Dennie. Although he edited but one volume, he is the first American editor, and the honors are transferred from New York to Philadelphia.
Charles Brockden Brown was the first man in America to cultivate literature as a profession; Dennie was the second. When inaugurating the _Port Folio_ he wrote of himself: "He has long been urged by a sober wish, or, if the sneering reader will have it so, he has long been deluded by the visionary whim, of making literature the handmaid of fortune, or at least of securing something like independence, by exertion, as a man of letters."
Of course Dennie and his colleagues who drew their poetry from Pope and their prose from Addison had no sympathy with the new romantic poetry that at the time of the birth of the _Port Folio_ was issuing from the English Lakes. "William Wordsworth" said the _Port Folio_ of 1809 "stands among the foremost of those English bards who have mistaken silliness for simplicity, and, with a false and affected taste, filled their papers with the language of children and clowns" (_P. F._, Vol. VII, p. 256).
The first American edition of Wordsworth was published in Philadelphia in 1802. It is exceedingly rare, and bears the following imprint:
LYRICAL BALLADS, | with | other poems: | In Two Volumes. | By W. WORDSWORTH. | [Motto] Quam nihil ad genium, papiniane, tuum! | Vol. I. | From the London Second Edition. | PHILADELPHIA: | _Printed and sold by James Humphreys,--At the N. W. Corner of Walnut and Dock street, 1802._ 2 _vols._ 120. VOL. I, _pp._ xxii-159. VOL. II, _pp._ 172.
The earliest notice of John Howard Payne is in the _Port Folio_, new series, Vol. I, p. 101 (1806). Payne was then a lad of fourteen years, and already editor of the _Thespian Mirror_ in New York.
The _Port Folio_, new series, Vol. II, p. 421, contains an account of the first dramatic performance composed in North Carolina, "NOLENS VOLENS; or, _The Biter Bit_," written by Everard Hall, a gentleman of North Carolina.
Dennie died January 7, 1812, and was buried in St. Peter's churchyard. A monument was erected to him, and the inscription carved upon it, which errs only in the place of his nativity, was written by his friend, John Quincy Adams: