[This unsigned essay from 1867 provides a brief, first-hand look at the critical regard for the Knickerbockers and their writings, revealing how, only a generation after their own time, the writings of the Knickerbockers were largely forgotten or dismissed by the critics.]

Fitz Greene Halleck, who left us the other day, was a writer whose works are a favorable specimen of what, speaking roughly, may be called the Knickerbocker literature. Of the school of writers which produced this literature it is true to say that it was composed of authors whom we all remember as forgotten. Their names are well enough remembered, but the present generation knows little of them except their names, that they very properly acknowledged Washington Irving as their leader and master, and that they lived in or about New York. Charles Fenno Hoffman was one of them, James Kirke Paulding was another, Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake were two more, and besides these there were Robert C. Sands, John Sanderson, the two Clarks—Willis Gaylord and Lewis Gaylord—Nathaniel Parker Willis, perhaps, and, in a sense, Cooper the novelist. Two men, for a time classed among these by the popular voice, are Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Bryant; but these have both escaped. Mr. Bryant deserved his good fortune. For what saddens him a man can hardly return gratitude; but respect, very genuine if not profound, every reader of Mr. Bryant's poems must, it seems to us, accord their author. The spirit of his poetry is melancholic almost to sombreness; there is in it nothing to delight. It might be compared to a chill wind which blows softly—not out of graveyards; it possesses hardly so much of human interest as that—which blows over graves that have long been forgotten, where lies, undistinguished from the common earth, the dust of disappeared races—unremembered nations and tribes resolved into earth. From such a soil grow all Mr. Bryant's lonesome, sad flowers of poetry. But though the impression produced by his poetry is not a pleasant one, and therefore not in the highest sense pleasing, still it is powerful, and he produces it of himself. Small faults of imitation he has, but the aspect of nature of which we have spoken—nature as seen from a solitary Indian mound sepulchre—is his own property, and at once he becomes independent of the Knickerbockers. Mr. Bancroft—who is to American history what Mr. Paulding is to American belles-lettres literature—came to New York from New England too late to be thoroughly identified with the old Knickerbocker people. A good many other names might be added to those we have mentioned, but they would be names, and no more at all, meaning nothing to this generation.

Doctor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, however, ought not to be passed by in silence, being, as he was, the Knickerbocker Boswell of our Knickerbocker Johnsons, in whose books they are perhaps more plainly to be seen than in any of their own works. Cotton Mather, during his sojourn here below, or above, produced three hundred and eighty-two books big and little; then comes Doctor Griswold, and praises him as "the first American Fellow of the Royal Society." It seems to us that in this critical judgment on so extremely literary an American as Mather was we find the clue which, if any clue were needed, would more surely than any other lead us to the right appreciation of the Knickerbocker literature. Indeed, it is so true as to be truismatically true that to the end of their days the writers who produced it were colonists and provincials; as literary men they had no right to any Fourth of July. Provincial they were even in the often-made assertion of their political independence and nationality, as any one may see to his abundant satisfaction who will look into the works of Paulding and see how that author, "lying supinely on his back," as somebody makes Patrick Henry say, "while his enemy binds him hand and foot"—writing stiffly in the manner of Swift with the matter of Paulding—insisted, with much illtemper, not that America was America, but that it was not England, was much better than England and bigger than England; that the Mississippi is a larger river than the Thames; that The Quarterly Review was not infallible, and in a variety of ways rapped British knuckles with a yardstick that after all was British. The case was of a less inflammatory character, but, perhaps, even more hopeless, when Paulding and his compeers were not engaged in being patriotic. As Doctor Griswold flatteringly says, Mr. Hoffman was our Knickerbocker Moore—with the breadth of the Atlantic between him and the Irish one; Mr. Cooper was Scott whenever he could be, so far as he could be, and was himself only when he came to backwoods and prairies which Sir Walter had not seen; Verplanck and Sanderson had not, to be sure, remembered enough, but certainly they had not forgotten enough of the essayists of Queen Anne's time and the reviewers of The Edinburgh. Willis's reputation is dead, not because he was essentially an imitator but because he was essentially a slight man in his books. But even though Willis did not reflect English literature, he was driven to putting into his books English literary men and English society. At any rate he did so, and found his account in it. Drake died young, but lived long enough to imitate the versification of Byron and Moore, and to make it pretty evident that he would never have emancipated himself. Lewis Gaylord Clark came again to the surface the other day after a perfectly characteristic fashion—a fashion characteristic, at any rate, of the school of which he was one, not, perhaps, characteristic of him; we know next to nothing about him—in a letter written à propos of Mr. Dickens's arrival. Of course Mr. Samuel Rogers figured in it; so did the library at Sunny-side, Sidney Smith, Henry Brevoort, Mr. Bryant, and Mr. Halleck. "I think," says Mr. Clark, "it was Mr. Bryant who, in this connection, mentioned the fact to Rogers that Halleck when in England had passed his house near Hyde Park. 'Tell him,' said Rogers, 'when he is next in England that the author of "Marco Bozzaris" must not pass my house again; he must come in.'" We love to think that probably Doctor Griswold had heard this anecdote a couple of hundred times. It would have done him such a world of good. "Rogers's house," he would say to himself, "and near Hyde Park! Rogers knew him as the author of 'Marco Bozzaris!'" And we can imagine with what scorn he would have gazed on the young person who after that declined to believe Mr. Halleck "one of the first poets of the age." He would have leaned back in his chair and proceeded to relate that "Mr. Bryant once said to Rogers, the poet-banker, that Mr. Halleck"—and so on. Then, it is possible, he grasped his pen firmly, and continued his biography of the poet: "One evening in the spring of 1819, as Halleck was on the way home from his place of business, he stopped at a coffee-house then much frequented by young men, in the vicinity of Columbia College. A shower had just fallen, and a brilliant sunset was distinguished by a rainbow of unusual magnificence. In a group about the door half-a-dozen had told what they would wish, could their wishes be realized, when Halleck said, looking at the glorious spectacle above the horizon: 'If I could have any wish, it should be to lie in the lap of that rainbow and read 'Tom Campbell.' A handsome young fellow standing near suddenly turned to him and exclaimed, 'You and I must be friends.'"

It was Joseph Rodman Drake who, thus impressed by a bit of imagery worthy of his own "Culprit Fay," thus proffered friendship, which was accepted on the spot. We have no need to imagine what sort of a man it was who could form the wish above recorded; it is still possible to turn to Halleck's works and discern plainly what Campbell, with the help of others, made of him. "Gem of the crimson-colored even," Campbell says, "Companion of retiring day," and Halleck follows after with "Twilight;" Byron, without at all meaning it, wrote "Fanny." Scott and Scott's parodists wrote for him "Alnwick Castle;" "Burns" Halleck himself had a finger in, and it was he, too, who wrote the energetic and obsolescent "Marco Bozzaris." Parts of the lastmentioned poem are, however, hardly yet obsolescent, and will hardly become so. It is the only poem of his in which he for a little while forgot himself—a feat of great difficulty for him; by which is meant not that he habitually carried undue self-consciousness into his poetry; but when he forgot himself he had to forget so many people.

The imitative character of Irving, also, the head and front of the school, is very generally, though it is not yet universally, recognized. There are still among us men of the generation whose hearts glowed within them when The Edinburgh praised "Bracebridge Hall," and who confuse the pleasure they got from Irving's works with the patriotic pleasure they got from the reviews of them. And then, unoriginal as he is, yet, speaking carefully, one would not so readily say of him that, born near the Tappan Zee, he closely imitated Addison, as one would say that he was a sort of a kind of an Addison—to speak after the New England fashion—who, by the bad accident of birth, happened to see the light in these Western wilds. As has often been said, his humor is imitative of the humor of the Anne-Augustan age; but it has a local color, and less often a local flavor, which proves it the fruit not of a graft merely, but of a tree in some respects sui generis. With this not very great amount of eulogy his admirers will be obliged, we suppose, to rest content; that seems to be the opinion on which criticism has for some time settled. For our own part, we should make this much abatement of the praise just given—his humor was constantly alloyed by a coarseness, sometimes with a knowing air half-concealed, sometimes not concealed at all, from which Addison kept himself more pure.

What has been said of the essentially imitative and colonial character of our Knickerbocker authors is not to be said, as nothing is to be said, without some limitations. Not much, however, is necessary in the way of limitation. Mr. Willis, for example, was the author of one or two little poems which possess the underived beauty of natural sentiments expressed in fine verse. Mr. Paulding is recognizable as an American patriot. Cooper, among his many utterly unreadable books, has one or two in which are one or two characters that are original with him, and that may be supposed natural. It is hard to tell. Indiscriminate praise was heaped on him; all of it that came from the other side of the water was bestowed by ignorant critics; most of it given him here was given by patriotically enthusiastic men, the mass of whom, we suppose, were as ignorant as their English brethren of the true Indian and true backwoodsman. We know nobody who gets through the books twice. However, the characters we have mentioned are, in a way, a success, and are, beyond a doubt, of Cooper's invention, unless we say that the backwoodsman was a discovery rather than an invention. What is true of Willis is to a less extent true of Morris, and so on of some of the others. But it remains true, too, that imitation was the life and breath of the Knickerbocker literature, and that it is now pretty much dead.

A few writers still linger among us who have sat at meat with the masters and disciples of it, and keep alive for a while longer its traditions in their own memories and the memories of the rest of us. Indeed, one or two of the disciples themselves are with us yet, and Halleck, but just gone, was even a master. Mr. L. G. Clark, who once edited The Knickerbocker Magazine—"Maga" and "Knick" they used to call it, with jocoseness—is, ex officio, of that other world. Mr. Tuckerman appears to be a connecting link between that one and ours. Mr. D. G. Mitchell smacks of it, and there are several other contemporary writers who, by some inexplicable, or explicable, association of ideas suggest to us the old days, though it would not be possible to bring them within our definition of the Knickerbocker author, or to make his description apply at all accurately to them.

Beyond a doubt it would be wrong to pass upon these writers whom we have been glancing at a sentence of unmitigated condemnation. They were once the hoast of their countrymen while yet Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, all our really best men, were considered but 'prentice hands, and while it was unsuspected that almost our only really good names in literature—names that have, at any rate, thrown into utter eclipse the renown of the Knickerbocker men—were those of writers who knew not Irving. Once, we say, they were very eminent, and they have since so thoroughly lost their former distinction that we do not know where to look for a case parallel to theirs. The master of them all died after Sumter was fired on, and already it seems as if he had lived two hundred years ago. But nevertheless they served a most useful purpose. They were our first crop—to borrow a figure—and very properly were ploughed in, and though nothing of the same sort has come up since, and we may be permitted to hope that nothing of just the same sort will ever again come up, yet certainly they did something toward fertilizing the soil from the products of which we are now getting a part of our food. Certainly they cherished in our not wholly civilized community a love for things not materialistic. Halleck, for instance, if he did but little for literature pure and simple, did more and better for American civilization than if he had wholly devoted himself to "the cotton trade and sugar line" or to his duties as John Jacob Astor's agent. Our young men in Wall street and the streets adjacent may better trust themselves to his influence, though he never "swung a railroad," as they say in the West, than to the influence of Commodore Vanderbilt, if we may name names, in whose eyes business, it would seem, is war, and the war-cry is vœ victis. It cannot be expected of the average critic of to-day to say that as literary men our Knickerbocker literature is a very fine thing or a very valuable thing, but as Americans, if we are not sorry that it exists no longer, we may very well be glad that it once existed.