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 of our party bickerings, and to the universal eagerness for political texts and their _commentary_.... Amid such 'wild uproar' the gentle voice of the Muse is scarcely audible." In these early years of the century literature was wretchedly paid. John Davis, the vivacious English writer of travels, offered, in 1801, two novels to any bookseller in the country who would publish them, on the condition of receiving fifty copies. The booksellers of New York could not, he said, undertake them, for they were dead of the fever. It is interesting to find Dennie writing in his introduction, "Literary industry, usefully employed, has a sort of draught upon the bank of opulence, and has the right of entry into the mansion of every Mæcenas.... Authors far elevated above the mire of low avarice have thought it debasement to make literature common and cheap."
[11] The editor of the _Aurora_ retorted in kind, and dubbed the _Port Folio_ "Portable Foolery."
The _Port Folio_ at once sprang into popular favor. In the life of Josiah Quincy, by his son, we read, "The _Port Folio_ was very far superior in literary ability to any magazine or periodical ever before attempted in this country. Indeed, it was no whit behind the best English magazines of that day, and would bear no unfavorable comparison with those of the present time on either side of the water. Its influence was greatly beneficial in raising the standard of literary taste in this country, and in creating a demand for a higher order of periodical literature and for more exact and careful editorship."