This increase in urban population rapidly multiplied the number of readers of varied tastes and developed a desire for literary entertainment, as well as for instruction. Works like those of Irving and Cooper gained wide circulation only because of the new demands, due to the increasing population, to the decline in colonial provincialism, and to the growth of the new national spirit. Probably no one would have been inspired, twenty-five years earlier, to write a work like Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_. Even if it had been produced earlier, the country would not have been ready to receive it. This remarkable book was published in New York in 1809, and more than a quarter of a century had passed before Massachusetts could produce anything to equal that work. In the New York group there were three great writers whom we shall discuss separately: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. Before we begin to study them, however, we may glance at two of the minor writers, who show some of the characteristics of the age. DRAKE AND HALLECK [Illustration: JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE] Two friends, who in their early youth styled themselves "The Croakers," were Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), "the Damon and Pythias of American poets." Drake was born in New York City in the same year as the English poet, John Keats, in London. Both Drake and Keats studied medicine, and both died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, but moved to New York in early youth, where he became a special accountant for John Jacob Astor. Although Halleck outlived Drake forty-seven years, trade seems to have sterilized Halleck's poetic power in his later life. The early joint productions of Drake and Halleck were poems known as _The Croakers_, published in 1819, in the New York _Evening Post_. This stanza from _The Croakers_ will show the character of the verse and its avowed object:-- "There's fun in everything we meet, The greatest, worst, and best; Existence is a merry treat, And every speech a jest: Be't ours to watch the crowds that pass Where Mirth's gay banner waves; To show fools through a quizzing-glass And bastinade the knaves." This was written by Drake, but he and Halleck together "croaked" the following lines, which show that New York life at the beginning of the nineteenth century had something of the variety of London in the time of Queen Anne, at the beginning of the eighteenth century:-- "The horse that twice a week I ride At Mother Dawson's eats his fill; My books at Goodrich's abide, My country seat is Weehawk hill; My morning lounge is Eastburn's shop, At Poppleton's I take my lunch, Niblo prepares my mutton chop, And Jennings makes my whiskey punch." [Illustration: FITZ GREENE HALLECK]