In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section. When in 1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize to Poe's first story, the _MS. Found in a Bottle_, was John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's administration. The year before he had published _Swallow Barn_, a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, _Horse-Shoe Robinson_ and _Rob of the Bowl_, the former a story of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852. But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the best of which were the _Partisan_, 1835, and the _Yemassee_. Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a difference. His novels are good boys' books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was strongly Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the _Charleston City Gazette_, took part against the Nullifiers. His miscellaneous writings include several histories and biographies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers contributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote numerous poems, the most ambitious of which was _Atlantis, a Story of the Sea_, 1832. His poems have little value except as here and there illustrating local scenery and manners, as in _Southern Passages and Pictures_, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's pleasant but not very strong _Virginia Comedians_ was, perhaps, in literary quality the best Southern novel produced before the civil war.