The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction appears on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835 with the staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s _Berenice_. Before it lies a period of experiment, of turning the accepted anecdotes, short romances, historical sketches, toward something vaguely felt after as more workmanlike. This is the period of precocious local magazines,[3] and of that ornament of the marble-topped tables of our grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and in color, the annual gift-books are alike,--externally in profusion of design and gilding, internally in serving up, as staples of their miscellany, poems and tales. Keepsakes they were called generically in England, France, and America; their particular style might be _Garland_ or _Gem_.[4] The _Atlantic Souvenir_, earliest in this country, so throve during seven years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with itself (1833) its chief rival, the _Token_. The utterly changed taste which smiles at these annuals, as at the clothes of their readers, obscures the fact that they were a medium, not only for the stories of writers forgotten long since, but also for the earlier work of Hawthorne. By 1835 the _New England Magazine_ had survived its infancy, and the _Southern Literary Messenger_ was born with promise. Since then--since the realisation of the definite form in Poe’s _Berenice_--the short story has been explored and tested to its utmost capacity by almost every American prose-writer of note, and by many without note, as the chief American form of fiction. The great purveyor has been the monthly magazine. Before 1835, then, is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a period of the manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the former have much that is national in matter; the short stories of the latter show nationality also in form.