The editor of the ‘Review’ was active in various ways. He studied the Romance languages, gave a course of lectures on poetry before the Athenæum Society (1825), and annual courses on mythology before the National Academy of the Arts of Design (1826–31). He was amused with New York life; Great Barrington had not been amusing. He published verse and prose in his own review and helped Sands and Verplanck edit their annual, ‘The Talisman.’ Somewhat later he edited _Tales of the Glauber Spa_ (1832), the joint work of Sands, Leggett, Paulding, Miss Sedgwick, and himself.[1] The ‘Review’ suffered from changes in the business management, and Bryant’s prospects became gloomy. At this juncture (1826) he was invited to act as assistant to William Coleman, editor of the ‘New York Evening Post.’ In 1828 he became ‘a small proprietor in the establishment,’ and when Coleman died (July, 1829) Bryant assumed the post of editor-in-chief and engaged as his assistant William Leggett, a young New Yorker who had shown a marked ability in conducting a weekly journal called ‘The Critic.’ ‘I like politics no better than you do’ (Bryant had written to Dana), ‘but ... politics and a bellyfull are better than poetry and starvation.’ His theory of the journalist’s function is well known. ‘He regarded himself as a trustee for the public.’[2] Party was much, and Bryant was a strong Democrat, but the people were greater than party. Bryant’s handling of public questions belongs to political history. His lifelong fight against a protective tariff, his defence of Jackson’s policy respecting nullification and the United States Bank, his maintenance of the right to discuss slavery as freely as any other subject about which there is a difference of opinion, his insistence that the question of giving the franchise to negroes in the state of New York be settled on its merits and as a local matter with which neither Abolitionist nor slave-holder had anything to do, his determined stand against the annexation of Texas and enlargement of the area of slavery, his position on a multitude of questions which in his life as a public censor he found it necessary to defend or to attack--are fully set forth in the two biographies by his coadjutors. From 1856 Bryant acted with the Republican party, giving his cordial support to Frémont and to Lincoln. He was a presidential elector in 1861. He advocated the election of Grant in 1868, and again in 1872, the latter time reluctantly ‘as the best thing attainable in the circumstances.’