The Philadelphia writers had their own little thrills, and their own little ambitions, and amid the poverty of their intellectual surroundings they refreshed themselves with visions of the giant things to come at large. James Hall, in his "Letters from the West," wrote: "The vicinity of Pittsburg may one day wake the lyre of the Pennsylvanian bard to strains as martial and as sweet as Scott; ... believe me, I should tread with as much reverence over the mausoleum of a Shawanee chief, as among the catacombs of Egypt, and would speculate with as much delight upon the site of an Indian village as in the gardens of Tivoli, or the ruins of Herculaneum."
American critics soon caught the contagion of sneering censure, and caused the _Port Folio_ to say, in 1811: "American critics seem, in almost all cases, to have entered into a confederacy to exterminate American poetry. If an individual has the temerity to jingle a couplet, and to avow himself descended from Americans, the offence is absolutely unpardonable." When Fenimore Cooper published his first novel, he suppressed his name and wrote instead, "PRECAUTION, by _an Englishman_."
Still, a notable feature of the American magazines was a general insistence upon or, perhaps, a preference for subjects out of American history, or articles dealing with what might be called American archæology--sketches of the life and character of "the ancients of these lands"--or, at least, contributions that were tricked out in some local garb or color. The minds of young American writers turned with alacrity to the subjects that lay nearest to them and which were intimately connected with the life of the country. A national literature was never altogether absent from their thoughts, however the fear of English censure or ridicule may have checked the aspiration. John Webbe, in his prospectus to the first American magazine, said that the new venture would be "an attempt to erect on neutral principles a publick theatre in the centre of the British Empire in America" (_Amer. Weekly Mercury_, October 30, 1740).
A discussion of the Philadelphia magazines takes us back to a time when Philadelphia led all the cities of the country in culture, in commerce, in statecraft and in authorship. Every new experiment in literature was first tried in Philadelphia. Her's was the first monthly magazine (January, 1741), and her's, too, the first daily newspaper (_Amer. Daily Advertiser_, December 21, 1784). The first religious magazine was _Sauer's Geistliches Magazien_ (1764)--for which Christopher Sauer cast his own type, the first made in America--and the first religious weekly was _The Religious Remembrancer_ (September 4, 1813). Philadelphia led off with the first penny paper (_The Cent_) in 1830; and the first mathematical journal (_The Annulus_), and the first _Juvenile Magazine_ (1802), and the first illustrated comical paper on an original plan, _The John Donkey_, in 1848, were all Philadelphia adventures.