For the first four or five years of the century, Dennie’s “Portfolio” contained almost everything that was produced in the United States under the form of light literature. The volumes of the “Portfolio” for that period had the merit of representing the literary efforts of the time, for Philadelphia insisted on no standard of taste so exacting as to exclude merit, or even dulness, in any literary form. Jacobins, as Dennie called Democrats, were not admitted into the circle of the “Portfolio;” but Jacobins rarely troubled themselves with _belles lettres_. The “Portfolio” reflected a small literary class scattered throughout the country, remarkable chiefly for close adhesion to established English ideas. The English standard was then extravagantly Tory, and the American standard was the same. At first sight the impression was strange. A few years later, no ordinary reader could remember that ideas so illiberal had seriously prevailed among educated Americans. By an effort, elderly men could, in the next generation, recall a time when they had been taught that Oliver Cromwell was a monster of wickedness and hypocrisy; but they could hardly believe that at any period an American critic coldly qualified “Paradise Lost,” and “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,” as good poetry, though written by a Republican and an enemy of established order. This was the tone of Dennie’s criticism, and so little was it confined to him that even young Buckminster, in his Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809, which was regarded as making almost an epoch in American literature, spoke of Milton’s eyes as “quenched in the service of a vulgar and usurping faction,” and of Milton’s life as “a memorable instance of the temporary degradation of learning.” Buckminster was then remonstrating against the influence of politics upon letters rather than expressing a political sentiment, but his illustration was colored by the general prejudices of British Toryism. Half a century before, Dr. Johnson had taken the tone of Tory patronage toward Milton’s genius, and Johnson and Burke were still received in America as final authorities for correct opinion in morals, literature, and politics. The “Portfolio” regarded Johnson not only as a “superlative” moralist and politician, but also as a “sublime” critic and a “transcendent” poet. Burke and Cicero stood on the same level, as masters before whose authority criticism must silently bow.