At the outset, before any number had been published, he wrote to a friend from whom be solicited a contribution: “The magazine is going to be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all available talent of all shades of opinion. The magazine is to have opinions of its own, and not be afraid to speak them, but I think we shall be scholarly and gentlemanlike.” “This reading endless manuscripts,” he wrote to the same friend, when he was in full tide of preparation for the first number, “is hard work, and takes a great deal of time, but I am resolved that nothing shall go in which I have not first read. I wish to have nothing go in that will merely _do_,[122] but I fear I can’t keep so high a standard. It is astonishing how much there is that keeps just short of the line of good and drops into the limbo of indifferent.” “There is a constant pressure on me,” he writes again, “to ‘popularize’ the magazine, which I resist without clamor.” It is easy to understand this attitude. Lowell cared greatly for the success of the _Atlantic_, and he was governed in his conduct of it by prudential considerations. In the letter just quoted he had occasion to refer to a controversy which was then hot. “I am urged,” he says, “to take ground in the Albany controversy, but do not feel that there is any _ought_ in the matter, and am sure the Trustees will beat in the end. I think it would be unwise to let the magazine take a losing side unless clear justice required it. Am I not right?” But though he was not indifferent to the commercial prosperity of the _Atlantic_, and knew well that its opportunity for serving letters was largely conditioned on its subscription list, he did not make the fatal mistake of subordinating his own judgment to a supposititious judgment of the mysterious public which buys and reads magazines. It was his business to keep his own judgment free from the partisan bias of idiosyncrasy, but he perceived well the more subtle danger to which he was exposed of abdicating his authority while keeping his title in the supposed interest of the magazine. It was just because he was Lowell, a man whom the public was ready to follow in literary judgments, that he was in this place, and it was in the application of a well-seasoned taste that he demonstrated his fitness for the position. He cared greatly to be the instrument of organizing a body of first-rate literature, and the tone which he gave the _Atlantic_ during the few months of his editorship became a tradition which powerfully affected its character after he retired from it. He put his own stamp on it emphatically.