Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/322

304 changes in name and in place and frequency of publication that need not be traced here. New York was the centre for political rather than religious reviews. The Democratic Review, founded in 1838, partook somewhat of the nature of a general magazine. Among its contributors were many of the most prominent American authors, including the New Englanders; and it also accepted contributions from relatively unknown writers, like Whitman in his early period. The contents included a little poetry and fiction, much on historical and political subjects, and some literary criticism. For a time The Democratic Review was a periodical of large relative importance, but it must have felt keenly the competition of the popular illustrated Harper's Monthly, and later of the Atlantic. Between 1853 and its death in 1859 it adopted sundry changes of name, and tried experiments in monthly, weekly, and quarterly publication. The American Whig Review had a briefer career, beginning in 1845 and coming to an end in 1852. It was a monthly, containing some verse and fiction, and a considerable amount of general literary criticism.

Among later attempts made to publish a review in New York may be mentioned The New York Quarterly, which ran from 1852 to 1855, The National Quarterly Review, 1860 to 1880, and The International Review, a bi-monthly, 1874 to 1883. All these, and especially the two last mentioned, show distinguished names on the list of contributors, and contain articles of value. Their successive deaths were doubtless due to the fact that the form of periodical to which they belonged had had its day. The latest venture, The Unpartizan Review (until 1919 the Unpopular Review), established in 1914 by Henry Holt and Company, and especially in charge of the senior member of that firm, frankly makes an appeal to a limited group of readers, and gives an opportunity for the publication of clever and valuable essays that might not see the light elsewhere.

The South, with its conservative tastes in literature, has perhaps offered of late the best field for the quarterly. The Southern Quarterly Review, published at Charleston and at Columbia from 1842 to 1857, had distinction of the old-fashioned sort, and contained articles on science, law, philosophy,