The infancy of the Evening Post coincided with the rise of the Knickerbocker school of letters, with which its relations were always intimate. Its first editor delighted in his old age to speak of his friendship with Irving, Halleck, Drake, and Paulding; while the second editor, Bryant, escaped inclusion with the Knickerbockers only by the fact that his poetry is too individual and independent to fit into any school at all. A mellow atmosphere hangs over the literary annals of New York early in the last century. We think of young Irving wandering past the stoops of quaint gabled houses, where the last representatives of the old Dutch burghers puffed their long clay pipes; or taking country walks within view of the broad Tappan Zee and the summer-flushed Catskills, halting whenever he could get a good wife to favor him with her version of the legends of the countryside. We think of that brilliant rainbow which Halleck stopped to admire one summer evening in front of a coffee-house near Columbia College, exclaiming: “If I could have my wish, it should be to lie in the lap of that rainbow and read Tom Campbell”; of Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and others of the “nine worthies” holding high revel in “Cockloft Hall” on the outskirts of Newark; and of Drake, the handsomest young man in town, like Keats studying medicine and poetry, and like Keats dying of consumption. We think of how the young men of the city were less interested in the news of Jena and Trafalgar than that Moore and Jeffrey had been arrested for fighting a duel, that Mr. Campbell had improved the leisure given him by a government pension by writing “Gertrude of Wyoming,” and that “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” was the work of a Scotch border sheriff.
97 When the first Evening Post was laid on six hundred doorsteps and counters, New York was almost ready to assert her temporary primacy in literature. Irving was studying law downtown in the office of Brockholst Livingston; Paulding, four and a half years older, was living with his sister, Mrs. William Irving; Cooper was at school with an Englishman in Albany; Halleck was a child of eleven playing about the Guilford Green. Bryant at Cummington had not yet begun his juvenile scribblings, but would soon do so. Charles Brockden Brown had just returned to the city from a summer excursion, and was watching the sale of the second part of “Arthur Mervyn.” Coleman sometimes met him at the homes of John Wells and Anthony Bleecker. The few Americans who paid any attention to letters had till now kept their gaze chiefly upon New England and Philadelphia. Dwight, the president of Yale, had just finished revising Watts’s Psalms, Joel Barlow, after shining abroad as a diplomat and making a fortune in speculation, was living in state in Paris, and Trumbull, another of the Hartford Wits, had just become a Connecticut judge. Nothing better than the unreadable “Columbiad” of Barlow and Dwight’s “Travels” was now to be expected from this trio. But in New York by 1805, though there was as yet little pure literature, there was an intellectual and semi-literary atmosphere. In addition to the young Knickerbockers, mention should be made of Tom Paine, dividing his last days, in debt, dirt, and dissipation, between New York and New Rochelle; and Philip Freneau, who frequently came over from his New Jersey seat.
Washington Irving made his first appearance in the Morning Chronicle, his brother’s journal, where at nineteen he published his “Jonathan Oldstyle” papers. Nearly five years later he, his brother William, and his brother-in-law, Paulding, collaborated upon the “Salmagundi Papers,” issued in leaflet form “upon hot-pressed vellum paper, as that is held in highest estimation for buckling up young ladies’ hair.” The twenty numbers, full of whimsy, mock seriousness, and light satire, delighted98 Coleman not as literature but as journalism. He saw that his long editorials attacking Jefferson’s measures for coast defense were flimsy weapons compared with the humorous “Plans for Defending Our Harbor,” which he copied in full, saying that it “hits off admirably some of the late philosophical, economical plans which our philosophical, economical administration seems to be intent on our adopting.” The Evening Post termed the whole series “the pleasant observations of one who is a legitimate descendant of Rabelais, and a true member of the Butler, Swift, and Sterne family.” Irving perhaps recalled this praise when the time came to announce his next work.
The clever expedient by which announcement and advertisement were joined is familiar to all readers of the “Knickerbocker History of New York.” Irving handed to Coleman for publication in the Evening Post of Oct. 26, 1809, the following notice:
Distressing
Left his lodgings some time since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning him, left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
P. S. Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity in giving an insertion to the above.
Such notices were then not infrequent. An authentic account has been preserved of how, some years later, the Evening Post saved the life of a Vermonter named Stephen Bourne by publishing an appeal for information regarding the whereabouts of an eccentric fellow named Colvin, who had disappeared and of whose murder Bourne had just been convicted upon circumstantial evidence. This appeal was read aloud in one of the New York hotels. It occurred to one of the guests that his brother-in-law in New Jersey had a hired man whose description99 answered to that given of Colvin; identification followed; and Bourne was released to fire a cannon at a general celebration of his deliverance. The news of Knickerbocker’s disappearance caused much concern, and a city officer took under advisement the propriety of offering a reward.
Within a fortnight a letter was published in the Evening Post which described the appearance of Knickerbocker trudging weariedly north from Kingsbridge. Two days later appeared in the Post an announcement by Seth Handaside, proprietor of the Columbian Hotel, that “a very curious kind of a written book” had been found in the room of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, and that if he did not return to pay his bill, it would be disposed of to satisfy the charges. A preliminary advertisement of the two volumes of the Knickerbocker “History” was printed in the Evening Post of Nov. 28, by Innskeep and Bradford, with the price—$3.
Because the Evening Post circulated among the most intelligent people of the city, and because it had never forgotten that one object stated in its prospectus was “to cultivate a taste for sound literature,” it was chosen by Drake and Halleck as the medium for the most famous series of satirical poems, the “Biglow Papers” excepted, in American literature.
Year in and year out, the Evening Post kept a space at the head of its news columns open for the best verse it could obtain. Just a month after it was established it plumed itself upon the publication of an original poem by the coarse but lively English satirist, “Peter Pindar” (Dr. John Wolcot), with whom Coleman corresponded. Wolcot is best remembered for verses ridiculing George III, and for his witticism that though George was a good subject for him, he was a poor subject to George. His contribution for Coleman, however, was not satiric, but a jejune three-stanza “Ode to the Lark.” In 1803 the editor obtained a poem from the banker-poet Samuel Rogers, then regarded as a luminary of the first magnitude. A year later he had the distinction of receiving100 from the august hand of Thomas Moore himself, who was on a tour through America, a manuscript poem, which was published in the Evening Post of July 9 without a title, and may be found in Moore’s works under the heading, “Lines Written on Leaving Philadelphia.” Unfortunately, Coleman had to accompany the publication with an apology; for though Moore had requested that the verses, which express his gratitude for his reception in Philadelphia, be withheld until Joseph Dennie could print them in his Portfolio there, Coleman had indiscreetly lent a copy to friends, and they had become such public property that there was no reason for keeping them longer out of the Post.
Much verse was also clipped from English periodicals and new English books, and it is creditable to Coleman’s taste that Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore” and Byron’s stanzas on Waterloo were reprinted immediately after their first publication. He received vast quantities of indifferent American verse, signed with assumed names—“Mercutio,” “Sedley,” “Puck,” and “Paridel”—together with some respectable nature poetry by “Matthew Bramble.” In 1820–21 there were contributions from John Pierpont, the author of “Airs of Palestine,” and Samuel Woodworth and George P. Morris, two minor Knickerbockers whose names are kept alive by “The Old Oaken Bucket” and “Woodman, Spare That Tree.” We may be sure that keen young men like Halleck and Drake kept their eyes upon this poetical corner of the Evening Post, and indeed, Halleck appeared in it as early as the fall of 1818. He had come to town seven years previous, had taken a place in the counting room of Jacob Barker, a leading banker and merchant, had become intimate with Drake and attended his wedding, and had written many and published one or two songs. He frequently revisited his boyhood home at Guilford, Conn., and during a passage up the Sound one fine autumn evening he mentally composed the stanzas entitled “Twilight.” Immediately upon his return to New York he sent the verses anonymously to the Evening Post; and101 though Coleman was exceedingly fastidious in his literary tastes, he gave the lines to the printer after a single reading. This was one of the first two poems which Halleck placed in his collected writings.
On a crisp March evening the next year readers who opened the Evening Post at their tea-table saw in a prominent position among the few news items the following acknowledgement:
Lines addressed to “Ennui” by “Croaker” are received, and shall have a place tomorrow. They are the production of genius and taste. A personal acquaintance with the author would be gratifying to the editor.
The next day, March 10, the position of honor was given up to the poem. “We have received two more poetic crackers of merit from our unknown correspondent, ‘Croaker,’” wrote Coleman, “which shall appear, all in good time. But we must husband them. His promise to furnish us with a few more similar trifles, though he tells us we must expect an occasional touch at ourselves or party, is received with a welcome and a smile.” And on March 11, Croaker’s lines, “On Presenting the Freedom of the City to a Great General”—Jackson had just received that honor—were accompanied with another appeal:
Is it not possible that we can have a personal and confidential interview with our friend “Croaker,” at some time and place he will name? If he declines, will he inform me how he may be addressed by letter? In the meantime, whatever may happen (he, at least, will, before long, understand me), I expect from him discretion.
Succeeding issues showed that the connection between Croaker and the Evening Post had become fixed and that the city was in for whole series of skits on men, manners, and events. On March 12 was printed the poem called “The Secret Mine Sprung at a Late Supper,” dealing with a recent political episode; next day it was followed by verses, “To Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist,” then a102 popular performer; on the 15th there appeared “To Mr. Simpson,” addressed to the manager of the city’s chief theater; and on the 16th two poems were printed at once.
Most of the Knickerbocker art was imitative, and the Croaker poems were in a vein which had been much exploited in England. “Peter Pindar,” George Colman the younger, whose humorous poems entitled “Broad Grins” had run through edition after edition, Tom Moore, and those kings of parody, Horatio and James Smith, were the models whom Croaker and Co. consciously or unconsciously followed. The moment was a happy one for such bold and witty thrusts. Had they appeared when party feeling was running high before or during the war, they would have given mortal offense; but the tolerance accompanying the political era of good feeling robbed them of any sting. From Coleman’s efforts to arrange an interview with the authors, we may surmise that he feared some other editor would share the prize, and that he had suggestions for further squibs. His literary discernment was never better evinced than by his enthusiastic reception of the first Croaker contribution. A dull editor would have passed over the lines to ennui—which were only a facile expression of weariness with the new books by Lady Morgan and Mordecai M. Noah, the Edinburgh Review, Gen. Jackson’s reception, Clinton’s political prospects, and the Erie Canal plans—without perceiving their unusual qualities; a careless editor would have printed them without asking for more. Coleman saw the possibility of indefinitely extending the satires.
 
William Coleman
Editor-in-Chief 1801–1829.
The origin of the poems had been purely casual. Halleck and Drake, the former now a prosperous and trusted aid of old Jacob Barker’s, the latter a full-fledged physician recently returned from Europe, happened in their romantic attachment to spend a leisurely Sunday morning with a mutual acquaintance. As a diversion, Drake wrote several stanzas upon ennui, and Halleck capped them. They decided to send them to Coleman, and, if he would not publish them, to Mordecai N. Noah,103 the Jewish journalist who had recently become editor of the Democratic National Advocate. Drake, returning to his home, also sent Coleman the two additional “crackers” which he acknowledged. The name “Croaker” then carried as distinct a meaning as would Dick Deadeye or Sherlock Holmes to-day, being that of the confirmed old grumbler in Goldsmith’s “Good-Natured Man.” Coleman’s request for a meeting was granted by the poets, who, as Halleck told his biographer, James Grant Wilson, one evening knocked at the editor’s door on Hudson Street:
They were ushered into the parlor, the editor soon entered, the young poets expressed a desire for a few minutes’ strictly private conversation with him, and the door being closed and locked, Dr. Drake said—“I am Croaker, and this gentleman, sir, is Croaker, Jr.” Coleman stared at the young men with indescribable and unaffected astonishment,—at length exclaiming: “My God, I had no idea that we had such talents in America!” Halleck, with his characteristic modesty, was disposed to give Drake all the credit; but as it chanced that Coleman alluded in particularly glowing terms to one of the Croakers that was wholly his, he was forced to be silent, and the delighted editor continued in a strain of compliment and eulogy that put them both to the blush. Before taking their leave, the poets bound Coleman over to the most profound secrecy, and arranged a plan of sending him the MS., and of receiving the proofs, in a manner that would avoid the least possibility of the secret of their connection with the Evening Post being discovered. The poems were copied from the originals by Langstaff [an apothecary friend], that their handwriting should not divulge the secret, and were either sent through the mails, or taken to the Evening Post office by Benjamin R. Winthrop.
The poems now followed in quick succession. On March 17 there was a sly skit upon the surgeon-general, Samuel Mitchill, the best-known—and most self-important—physician and scientist in the city, and a man noted in the history of Columbia College; the next day an address to John Minshull, a prominent merchant; on March 19 a poem of general theme, “The Man Who Frets”; on104 March 20 and 25, verses upon Manager Simpson of the Park Theater again; and on March 23 lines “To John Lang, Esq.,” the sturdy old editor of the Gazette. An apostrophe “To Domestic Peace” and “A Lament for Great Ones Departed” also appeared in March, as did two complimentary epistles in verse to the authors, selected by Coleman from “the multitude of imitators that the popularity of Croaker has produced.” One writer spoke of Croaker and Co. as “the wits of the day and the pride of the age,” while the other credited them with making “all Gotham at thy dashes stare.” There was a pause early in April while Drake was out of town, and Coleman confessed that “on account of the public, we begin to be a little impatient.” But the series recommenced on April 8, and by May 1, when a poem to William Cobbett, the eminent English journalist, then sojourning on Long Island, appeared, twenty-one had been printed. One Croaker contribution had meanwhile come out in Noah’s National Advocate. After another pause, on May 29 the Evening Post published the gem of the whole collection, Drake’s “The American Flag,” with the final quatrain written by Halleck. Coleman prefaced this famous patriotic lyric with the remark that it was one of those poems which, as Sir Philip Sidney said of the old ballad of Chevy Chase, stir the heart like a trumpet. It might more truly be said that, with its blare of sound and pomp of imagery, it stirs the bearer like a full brass band. Probably not even Coleman realized how many generations of schoolboys would declaim:
When freedom from her mountain height,
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there!
The success of the “Salmagundi Papers” did not compare in immediacy or extent with that of the Croaker poems. Copies of the Evening Post, which now had 2,000 subscribers, passed from hand to hand. In homes, bookstores, coffee-houses, taverns, and on the street corners105 every one, as Halleck wrote his sister on April 1, was soon discussing the skits. “We have had the pleasure of seeing and of hearing ourselves praised, puffed, eulogized, execrated, and threatened as much as any writers since the days of Junius,” he informed her. “The whole town has talked of nothing else for three weeks past, and every newspaper has done us the honor to mention us in some way, either of praise or censure, but all united in owning our talents and genius.” The two young men, unused to seeing themselves in print, were tremendously elated. Once upon receiving a proof of some stanzas from the Evening Post, Drake laid his cheek down upon the lines and, with beaming eyes, exclaimed to his fellow-poet: “O, Halleck, isn’t this happiness!” Most of the Croaker series, which was virtually concluded in June, though two poems now generally bracketed with them appeared in 1821, were too much the product of joint labor to be assigned to one writer or the other; the theme suggested itself, and both would elaborate it.
The newspapers received dozens of replies or imitations, Coleman once showing Halleck a sheaf of fifteen that had come in during a single morning. In spite of their local subjects, many of the poems were reprinted all over the North, and as far south as Washington. Woodworth, who himself wrote not a little on New York affairs, successfully begged a contribution from Halleck for his magazine. It may be mentioned that Coleman took some liberties with the series. To one he prefixed a humorous letter, in another he inserted a couplet, and in a third he altered the overworked name Chloe to Julia.
To modern readers the allusions to persons and events have lost their wit, and the historical interest they have gained is only partial compensation. We find little humor in the contretemps which occurred when Gen. Jackson, entertained by the city leaders, and already a Presidential possibility, threw the dinner into confusion by toasting De Witt Clinton, who as a former Federalist was heartily hated by many New York Democrats. Hence those106 numbers seem the freshest which are most general in theme. The “Ode to Fortune” is better than the lines “To Simon,” who was caterer at fashionable balls and weddings. “The Man Who Frets” is more interesting than “To Capt. Seaman Weeks,” who was leading an independent political movement against Tammany. Only here and there are jests that we still appreciate, as the advice to the theatrical manager to discharge his comedians and hire the side-splitting legislators at Albany, and satire still comprehensible, as the verses upon Trumbull’s florid Revolutionary paintings, which now hang in the national Capitol:
Go on, great painter! dare be dull——
No longer after Nature dangle;
Call rectilinear beautiful;
Find grace and freedom in an angle;
Pour on the red, the green, the yellow,
“Paint till a horse may mire upon it,”
And while I’ve strength to write or bellow,
I’ll sound your praises in a sonnet.
But the skits are almost a catalogue of the worthies of the town. The prominent merchants were represented by such names as Henry Cruger, Nathaniel Prime, John K. Beekman, and John Jacob Astor. The politicians—Henry Meigs, who voted for admitting Missouri, Clinton, Morgan Lewis, Rufus King, and others—had more attention than any other group. Croaker had much fun at the expense of the chief hotel-keepers: Abraham Martling, owner of the Tammany Hall Hotel, and a political figure of importance, William Niblo, whose restaurant at William and Pine Streets was popular, and Cato Alexander, to whose tavern on the postroad four miles out all the young bucks made summer excursions. The stage folk received generous space, among them James W. Wallack and Miss Catherine Lesugg, later Mrs. James Hackett, whose family names were to figure so prominently in American theatrical history. Fifty years later James Hackett himself contributed to the Evening Post an107 interesting chapter of reminiscences of Halleck, recalling how they had first become friends when they were both admirers of the blooming Miss Lesugg, then fresh from England, and how they maintained the friendship till Halleck’s death. Even the editors—Coleman, Lang, Woodworth, “whose Chronicle died broken-hearted,” and Spooner of Brooklyn—were not spared by Croaker.
Newspapers, however, usually establish a literary reputation not by original poetry, but by literary criticism, and we may well stop to examine the Evening Post’s record in this field. It was slightly handicapped by the fact that between 1801 and the appearance of “The Spy” in 1821 there was virtually nothing worth criticizing. Charles Brockden Brown had finished his career as a novelist before the Evening Post was fairly launched. Irving was silent after his publication of the Knickerbocker “History” until the first part of “The Sketch-Book” appeared in 1819. In verse almost nothing but that marvelous piece of boyish inspiration, “Thanatopsis,” is now remembered. Patriotic Americans of the day, like Coleman, made a painful effort to believe that Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons,” Paine’s “Juvenile Poems,” Mrs. Sigourney’s “Moral Pieces,” and Pierpont’s “Airs of Palestine” were very nearly as good as the literature coming from the pens of Byron, Coleridge, Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley; but the pretense was a ghastly mockery.
Most of the early book notices in the Evening Post were of two useful kinds: they were either an examination of political pamphlets for party ends, or a gutting of new books of travel, biography, and history for their news value. From the very commencement of the journal, many columns of matter were furnished by the various pamphlets called forth by Vice-President Burr’s attempted suppression of John Wood’s “History of the Administration of John Adams”; for this internecine warfare among Democrats delighted all Federalists. In the first days of 1803 pamphlets upon the annexation of Louisiana began to demand selection and comment. Then came pamphlets108 upon the embargo, non-intercourse, impressment, and the conduct of the British minister, Jackson. The original publication of the very effective pamphlet by a “New England Farmer” upon “Mr. Madison’s War” was in installments in the Evening Post during the summer of 1812. Gouverneur Morris inspired the newspaper’s careful attention to the Erie Canal question; one evidence of its interest in the subject was a series of articles in the spring of 1807, reviewing the writings of “Agricola” upon it.
The books which were gutted were sometimes exceedingly interesting. Thus in 1816 Coleman published copious extracts from James Simpson’s “Visit to Flanders,” a vivid account of Waterloo and other battlefields as they appeared the month after Napoleon’s defeat. In 1817 much was made of Cadwallader Colden’s “Life of Fulton,” and two years later of M. M. Noah’s entertaining “Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States.” The extracts from O’Meara’s memoirs of Napoleon, printed in 1822, led Coleman into an attack upon Napoleon’s jailer at St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe; and when Col. Wm. L. Stone of the Commercial Advertiser came to Lowe’s defense, an animated controversy followed.
It was part of Coleman’s editorial creed to beat the big drum for American letters. Most of the Knickerbocker writers were themselves really provincial in literary matters, keeping always a nervous and envious eye upon England; for it was the period when, as Lowell puts it, we thought Englishmen’s thought, and with English salt on her tail our wild eagle was caught. This provincialism frequently expressed itself in an insistence that America was, not America, but a bigger England, and that the Hudson was not the Hudson, but a nobler Thames. Coleman thought it his duty to encourage native literature, and the amount of fifth-rate verse that was given patriotic praise in the Evening Post is dismaying.
The ode of Robert Treat Paine, jr., “Rule New England,” was commended with a warmth that owed something109 to Coleman’s intimacy with the elder Paine. Personal considerations also had their share in the flattering notice of Winthrop Sargent’s “Boston” the next year. Coleman was one of the few who has ever closed Peter Quince’s “Parnassian Shop” “with impressions favorable to the young author.” In 1805 he was struck by the “Democracy Unveiled” of Thomas Green Fessenden, a poetaster who had got some notice by writing a successful book while imprisoned for debt in Fleet Street, London. Francis Arden received favorable mention for a translation of Ovid, while another very minor bard, Richard B. Davis, who before his premature death had been a friend of Irving and Paulding, was generously praised in 1807. The Post published a review of Pierpont’s “Airs of Palestine” by Henry Brevoort, Irving’s bosom friend, and pronounced it indispensable to any American library. It thought Halleck’s amusing satire on a New York merchant family in society, “Fanny,” a better poem than Byron’s “Beppo,” whose verse it imitated. Byron’s popularity at this time was such that when his “Mazeppa” was published in England, a copy was hurried to Philadelphia by the fast ship Helen, was placed in the printer’s hands at 2 p. m., and twenty-two hours later the volumes were issuing from the press complete and being rushed to the bookstores.
But there were a few books that live. After Brockden Brown’s death in 1810, we find repeated mention of him, “amiable and beloved by all his acquaintances,” by Coleman. “Wieland” the editor thought worthy of his powers; and he remarked of “Ormond” that the reason why it was formal and uninteresting was, as he personally knew, that it was “written by stinted tasks of so many pages a day, and sent to the printer without correction or revision, or even reading over, till it came back to him in proof.” One of Coleman’s last contributions to the Evening Post was a short notice of a new set of Brown. He singled out for remark the fact that the novelist seldom troubled to give minute descriptions of sensible objects. “These he generally dispatches with a few brief and bold110 touches, and bends his whole strength to the speculative parts of the work, to follow out trains of reflection and the analysis of feelings.” In 1806 the Evening Post carried a half dozen articles upon Noah Webster’s new octavo dictionary of the English language, condemning it as to definitions, orthography, and orthoepy, and quarreling violently with some of Webster’s grammatical and etymological opinions. The reviewer accused Webster of grossly misrepresenting the views of the English lexicographer Walker. Webster replied in two long and forcible articles, compelling the reviewer to admit some mistakes.
Irving’s career was closely followed by the Post. It defended his Knickerbocker “History” against the embattled Dutch families, led by Gulian C. Verplanck, who charged that he had defamed them. When the first part of “The Sketch Book” appeared, a prompt review was contributed by “a literary friend,” probably Brevoort or Paulding. Warmly eulogistic, it is still discriminating. It commended Irving for his “grace of style; the rich, warm tone of benevolent feeling; the freely-flowing vein of hearty and happy humor, and the fine-eyed spirit of observation, sustained by an enlightened understanding, and regulated by a perception or fitness—a tact—wonderfully quick and sure.” It declared “Rip Van Winkle” the masterpiece of the collection. “For that comic spirit which is without any infusion of gall, which delights in what is ludicrous rather than what is ridiculous (for its laughter is not mixed with contempt), which seeks its gratification in the eccentricities of a simple, unrefined state of society, rather than in the vicious follies of artificial life; for the vividness and truth, with which Rip’s character is drawn, and the state of society in the village where he lived, is depicted; and for the graceful ease with which it is told, the story of Rip Van Winkle has few competitors.” Unfortunately, Coleman added a footnote in which he stated his personal opinion that “Rip Van Winkle” lacked probability, and that the poetical tale of “The Wife” was superior.
Six weeks later the second part of “The Sketch Book”111 was reviewed with equal taste by apparently the same hand—that of some one who knew how hard Irving was hit by the death of his fiancée, and his circumstances abroad. At the beginning of 1823 Coleman himself wrote two long articles in praise of the new “Bracebridge Hall,” declaring that he had undertaken the task of rescuing it “from the rude and ill-natured treatment of some of our American critics”; the Literary Repository and two newspapers of Philadelphia and Baltimore having assailed it. One reason for its ill-natured reception, he thought, was the high charge made for the American edition, and another the kindly view it took of British life and manners. He showed no little acquaintance with Irving’s personal affairs, and probably had seen some of his letters home. One epistle, written late in 1819, and telling of the essayist’s acquaintanceships in London, had been copied out by Mrs. Hoffman, mother of Irving’s dead sweetheart, for the Evening Post.
Those were the days in which Sydney Smith’s taunt, “Who reads an American book?” struck home. In 1820 Coleman recorded with pride that the rage for new publications was so great that “not a day passes but the press is delivered of two or more”; though he referred to magazines as well as books. On Sept. 4, 1823, he boasted that such value was becoming attached to American literature in Great Britain that its republication was profitable. A Scotch publisher had begun issuing selections from Irving, Brooks, Percival, and others in a miscellany circulated from Edinburgh. “Our sun has certainly arisen, and one day, we predict, it will beam as bright as it does, or ever did, in the Old World; and the Americans who may arise in future ages will not have to blush on hearing their classics named with the greatest of antiquity.”
More space was consistently given by the Evening Post to reviews of plays than to book notices. In fact, the keen interest of New Yorkers in the theater had produced very competent dramatic criticism before the newspaper was founded. William Dunlap, the famous manager-playwright112 of the time, tells us that in 1796 there was organized in the city a little group of critics, including Dr. Peter Irving, Charles Adams, son of John Adams, Samuel Jones, William Cutting, and John Wells, the law-partner of Coleman. They would take turns writing a criticism of the evening’s play, and meet next day to discuss and revise it before handing it to one of the newspapers. Their meetings had ended before 1801, but after the Evening Post began publication several of the group, and especially Wells, wrote much for the new journal.
The theater was the more prominent in Old New York because the variety of public entertainments in and just after 1803 was small. Those with a literary turn of mind might drop in at the Shakespeare Gallery on Park Street, which afforded a “belles lettres lounge”—that is, a table laden with newspapers and magazines of the day, and soft seats in a well-lighted room, for $1.50 a year. Those with scientific tastes could go to the Museum on Broadway, with its curiosities ranging from mastodon bones to a representation of Gen. Butler being tomahawked by the Osages, and another of Mrs. Rawlings and her six infants at a birth. There was a thin stream of entertainers—magicians, who were approved because their illusions taught the young to beware of wily rogues; ventriloquists, balloonists, rare at first and objects of supreme interest, exhibitors of lions and tapirs, and novelties like the Eskimo whom a sea captain brought to town and who gave aquatic exhibitions on the Hudson. In summer the public had several open-air amusement places. One named Vauxhall was situated near the top of the Bowery, offering music, fireworks, and refreshments. Another was the Columbian Gardens, and the most ambitious was the Mt. Vernon Gardens. In winter, one of the chief fashionable events was the annual concert of the Philharmonic Society, held impressively at Tontine Hall on Broadway, and consisting half of instrumental music, half of vocal solos from now forgotten operas like the “Siege of Belgrade.” About New Year’s began the select113 dances of the City Assembly, in the assembly rooms in William Street. Here young ladies made their début, the finest gowns were exhibited, and the bucks showed a skill acquired at the dancing school of M. Lalliet.
This list of amusements comes near being exhaustive, and the Park Theater was always the center of attraction. The building, fronting on Park Row, had been completed in 1798 at a cost placed by the Evening Post—no doubt an overestimate—at $130,500. The charge was $1 for box seats, of which there were at first three full circle tiers, and after 1807 four; 75 cents to the pit, and 50 cents to the gallery. Early in the century performances began at 6:30, and at 9:30; the first play was usually followed by a farcical after-piece. Washington Irving as a lad used to pretend to go to bed after prayers, descend to the ground by way of the roof of a woodshed, and slip away to see this final performance. The Evening Post gives us a good deal of information about the management of the theater, which was under Dunlap until 1808, and then under Cooper and Price. In its first issue Dunlap appealed to his patrons against the dangerous practice of “smoaking,” saying that the use of cigars was a constant topic for ridicule by European travelers. From Coleman’s later comments we learn that no woman would for a moment have thought of sitting anywhere but in the boxes, and that no gentleman would have shared the gallery with the rough crowd that filled it. Even the pit, with its dirty, broken floor, its backless benches, and its incursions of rats from crannies under the stage, would now be considered hardly tolerable. About the entrance there always clustered a set of idle boys and disorderly adults who, when spectators left during an intermission or before the after-piece, set up a clamor for the return checks. Efforts to stop the gift or sale of these checks were in general futile. The interior was renovated in 1807, enlargements were made to give a total of 2,372 seats, patent lamps were installed, and a room above the lobby was fitted up as a bar and114 restaurant. Still further improvements were made in 1809.
The independent and severe criticisms of the acting which appeared in the Evening Post, and to a lesser extent in Irving’s Morning Chronicle, were not at first relished by theatrical folk. The names of the actors and actresses, Cooper, Fennell, Hallam, Turnbull, Mrs. Johnson, and so on are now all but forgotten. In Boston in 1802 dramatic criticism was written largely by performers themselves, who sat up till an early hour to insure proper newspaper notices, and in Charleston the same practice had been known. In all cities most actors held that no one was really competent to serve as a critic unless he was familiar with the performances at the two great London theaters. So irritated did the dramatic guild become that in January, 1802, there was produced at the theater a satire upon the Evening Post reviews, written by Fennell and called “The Wheel of Truth.” It was designed to show one Littlewit, a newspaper critic, in a ludicrous and foolish light. He was represented as finding fault with Stuart’s portrait of Washington because by the footrule the head was a half-inch too long, and with a certain book because for the same price he could buy one twice as heavy. Coleman answered this attack in five columns published in two issues, which was five columns more than it deserved. He, Wells, and Anthony Bleecker continued reviewing, and a contemporary writer records that he “aimed to settle all criticism by his individual verdict.”
Upon most of the plays there was little to say, for they were long familiar to readers and theater-goers. Shakespeare was given year in and year out, a full dozen of his dramas. Others of the Elizabethans, including Ben Jonson, Marlowe (“The Jew of Malta”), Massinger, Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher, were occasionally seen. Otway’s “Venice Preserved” was something of a favorite. The comedies of Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Fielding had regular representations. George Colman’s plays, especially “John Bull,” were highly popular, John Home’s “Douglas” was always sure of a house,115 and for the first two decades of the century Kotzebue was much played and admired; while many of Scott’s novels and poems were dramatized. The Evening Post said of the first performance of “Marmion,” in 1812, that it “presents a chef-d’?uvre of melodramatic excellence.” In William Dunlap at first, and later in M. M. Noah, New York had its own rather crude dramatists. When the latter’s patriotic play, “She Would be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa,” was presented in 1819, Coleman spoke of it coldly, suggesting that the plot had been inspired by the French tale of “Lindor et Clara, ou la Fille Soldat,” and admitting only that “it is not deficient in interest.” But he applauded Noah’s “Siege of Tripoli” next year as deserving what it met, “a greater degree of success than we ever recollect to have attended an original piece on our stage.” Its vivacity, its martial ardor, its declamation, he thought calculated to arouse a high and manly patriotism. Nearly the whole of the criticisms, however, had to be given up not to plays, but to performers and interpretations of parts.
It was only toward the end of Coleman’s long editorship that the first brilliant chapter in the history of the New York stage began. The actor of greatest note before the War of 1812 was George Frederick Cooke, who was warmly applauded by the Evening Post in a run which began at the Park Theater in November, 1810, and who lies buried in St. Paul’s churchyard. It is interesting to note that during the war English stage-folk, for most of the actors and actresses of the day were English, continued to play before admiring audiences. An engagement which the manager had made with Philip Kemble was suspended; but the Evening Post announced in August, 1812, when fighting was general, that the well-known London actor Holman and his daughter had just sailed, and they had a successful New York engagement that autumn. The Evening Post in 1819 greatly admired the English singer and actor Phillipps, and Coleman’s praise helped to bring him $9,900 gross in six benefit nights. It had a warm word for Catherine Lesugg and116 for James W. Wallack, when they made their New York début in September, 1818. But the first great dramatic event at the Park Theater was the initial American appearance, on Nov. 29, 1820, of Edmund Kean in “Richard III.”
Kean was in his early thirties, and for a half dozen years, since his first triumphant season at Drury Lane in 1814, New York had been hearing of his magnificent powers. Coleman went to the theater that autumn night suspicious that most of his reputation had been acquired by stage trickery and appeals to the groundlings. He saw a man below the middle stature, and heard a voice thin and grating in its upper tones. “But,” admitted the editor, “he had not finished his soliloquy before our prejudices gave way, and we saw the most complete actor, in our judgment, that ever appeared on our boards.” The eyes were wonderfully expressive and commanding, and in its lower register the voice, said Coleman, “strikes with electric force upon the nerves, and at times chills the very blood.” He declared, in an enthusiasm which recalls Coleridge’s remark that seeing Kean play was like reading Shakespeare by lightning flashes:
We had been induced to suppose that it was only in the more important scenes that we should see Kean’s superiority, and that the lighter passages would, in theatrical phrase, be walked over. Far otherwise; he gave to what has heretofore seemed the most trivial, an interest and effect never by us imagined. The most striking point he made in the whole play (for we cannot notice the many minor beauties he exhibited) was his manner of waking and starting from his couch, with the cry of “Give me a horse—bind up my wounds! Have mercy, heaven! Ha, soft, ’twas but a dream.” ... This, with all that followed, was so admirable; bespeaking a soul, so harrowed up by remorse, so loaded with his guilt, as gave such an awful and impressive lesson to youth, that no one who witnessed it can ever forget it.
When Kean played in “The Merchant of Venice,” according to the Evening Post, the audience hung so breathless upon him that “when it was almost impossible to117 restrain loud bursts of delight, a kind of general ‘hush!’ was whispered from every part.” Many thought that his best r?le was Sir Giles Overreach, and an anonymous critic in the Evening Post said so. Coleman wrote that the effect he produced as King Lear was indescribable:
Strong emotions even to tears were excited in all parts of the house; nor were they confined to the female part of the audience. It could not be otherwise. Who could remain callous to the appearance of a feeble old monarch, upwards of fourscore years, staggering under decrepitude and overwhelmed with misfortunes, attended with aberration of mind which ends in downright madness? Such a representation was given with perfect fidelity by Mr. Kean. His plaintive tones were heard from the bottom of a broken heart, and completed the picture of human woe. Nature, writhing under the poignancy of her feeling, and finding no utterance in words or tears, found a vent at length for her indescribable sensations in a spontaneous, idiotic laugh. The impression made upon all who were present, will never be forgotten. His dreadful imprecations upon his daughters, his solemn appeals to heaven, struck the soul with awe.
On the final night, Dec. 28, according to the report in the Evening Post, the theater rang with unprecedented plaudits, and at the close the audience rose by common impulse and cheered Kean three times three.
But when Kean returned to New York in 1825 he was greeted with a storm of mixed applause and anger—his first night was the night of the famous “Kean Riot.” In 1821 he had accepted a summer engagement in Boston, and on the third night, finding the theater almost empty because of the heat, refused to go on with the play, thereby giving great offense. Moreover, after his return to England, reports of his flagrant immorality reached America. When the Commercial Advertiser heard of his second tour, it denounced him as a shameless “scoundrel” and “libertine.” Coleman, however, was eager to defend him. The Park Theater opened on Kean’s first night, Nov. 14, at 5:30, and it was at once filled with a crowd of more than 2,000. Seven-eighths, according to the Evening Post, were eager to hear Kean, but about one hundred,118 many of them Bostonians, made up an organized opposition. The moment the actor stepped forward, the groans, hisses, and shouts of “Off Kean!” mingled with the clapping and the cheers of his friends, were deafening. The play proceeded amid a continued uproar. Some few scenes in the fourth and fifth acts were heard, but the others, including all in which Kean appeared, were given in dumb show. The actor tried repeatedly to address the audience, but in vain. At one point he was struck in the chest by an orange. One interrupter was put out by the infuriated audience, and fights occurred in various parts of the pit, with damage to benches and furniture.
It would be pleasant to say that the Evening Post roundly denounced this disgraceful scene, but it rebuked it only mildly. Fortunately, the outrage was not repeated. Kean issued a mollifying address, the Bostonians went home, and a reaction ensued. As the Evening Post records, every one of his houses was filled to overflowing, and when he took his benefit night on Feb. 25, 1826, upon leaving, his receipts were $1,800 clear.
Compared with that of Kean, the début of Junius Brutus Booth, made in “Richard III” on the night of Oct. 5, 1821, attracted little attention. He came to the city a perfect stranger, and slowly made his way. When Edwin Forrest appeared at the New York Theater, in the Bowery, in the autumn of 1826, the Evening Post pronounced this American-born actor as good as any but the very foremost Englishmen—“irresistibly imposing,” indeed. But the only engagement comparable with Kean’s was that of Macready, who made his bow on Oct. 3, 1826, as Virginius in the well-known tragedy of that name by Knowles. He was greeted so enthusiastically that he was disconcerted, and many thought him no better than their old favorite, Cooper. But on the second night, when he impersonated Macbeth, his genius was perceived. Coleman wrote that he had never seen the r?le embodied so consistently. “There was a unity in his conception of character, which made the development119 of Macbeth’s feelings and prompting motives ... perfectly intelligible, from his first interview with the weird sisters to the final overthrow of all his hopes, and his desperate conflict with Macduff.”
The New York which Macready visited in 1826 was no longer a city of one playhouse, though when people spoke of “the theatre” they still always meant that on Park Row. The people could now support more than one star and one company at a time. Macready finished his October engagement on the 20th, and was immediately followed by Mr. and Mrs. James K. Hackett, in the first American performance of “The Comedy of Errors.” At the Chatham Theater, Junius Brutus Booth was playing Shakespeare; on the 25th he gave “Othello,” with James Wallack as Iago. Mrs. Gilbert at the New York Theater, a brand-new edifice in the Bowery, seating 3,000 spectators, was presenting “Much Ado About Nothing.” She was succeeded the next month by Forrest in a repertory of plays. The Evening Post that spring had surprised many by stating that the profits of the Chatham Theater the previous season had been $23,000, and the gross receipts $75,000. Of the former sum “The Lady of the Lake” alone, a play with musical numbers interspersed, had yielded $10,000. The newspaper was delighted when the Hacketts received, on their three benefit nights in “The Comedy of Errors,” a total of $3,500. This was actually $1,100 more than the balloonist, Eugene Robertson, took one afternoon that month when he floated from Castle Garden to Elizabeth, N. J., in the presence of a crowd estimated at more than 40,000.
The day when the Evening Post should have a musical editor was as far distant as that when it should give to sports more than a semi-annual paragraph or two upon the races. But Coleman enthusiastically reviewed the first Italian opera offered in the city—a performance of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” at the New York Theater on Nov. 29, 1825. The fashion of the town turned out to see this Italian troupe, headed by Se?or Garcia, on every Tuesday and Saturday during the middle of the120 winter; paying $2 for box seats and $1 for the pit. “In what language shall we speak of an entertainment so novel in this country?” asked the editor:
All have obtained a general idea of the opera by report. But report can give but a faint idea of it. Until it is seen, it will never be believed that a play can be conducted in recitative or singing and yet appear nearly as natural as the ordinary drama. We were last night surprised, delighted, enchanted; and such were the feelings of all who witnessed the performance. The repeated plaudits with which the theater rang were unequivocal, unaffected bursts of rapture.
Would American taste approve of the opera? “We predict,” Coleman ventured, “that it will never hereafter dispense with it.”