The editor continued his unavailing efforts for a sound copyright law year after year, decade after decade. He took pains to do justice to the opposition, recognizing that it was by no means all mercenary, and that economists like Matthew Carey advanced arguments worthy of examination. When Dickens published a letter (July 14, 1842) in the London _Morning Chronicle_, asserting that the barrier to the reform in America was the influence of “the editors and proprietors of newspapers almost exclusively devoted to the republication of popular English works,” and that they were “for the most part men of very low attainments, and of more than indifferent reputation,” Bryant hastened in the _Evening Post_ to call this a misrepresentation. He knew many sincere and respectable men who condemned the international copyright proposals from the best of motives. But the crusade was always near his heart. When in 1843 a petition for the needed law was presented to Congress by ninety-seven firms and persons engaged in the book trade, he supported it, and he did the same when ten years later five New York publishers addressed Secretary of State Everett in behalf of a copyright treaty with Great Britain. At this time he believed that the chief obstacle was the simple indifference of Congressmen; that they did not comprehend the question, nor try to comprehend it, because no party advantage or disadvantage was connected with it. In the thirties and forties book-reviewing, in the strict sense of the phrase, was almost unknown in the New York daily press. The chief exceptions to the rule were furnished by Edgar Allan Poe, who in the middle forties contributed some genuine criticism to N. P. Willis’s _Mirror_ and other journals, and by Margaret Fuller. Miss Fuller, writing in the _Tribune_ for more than a year and a half preceding her visit to Europe in 1846, performed a signal service to American letters by her courage and acuteness, for her criticism of Longfellow as too foreign in his themes and of Lowell as too imitative had a salutary effect upon those poets. But Poe and Margaret Fuller were passing meteors in New York journalism. Until George Ripley and John Bigelow joined the _Tribune_ and _Evening Post_ respectively in 1849 mere hasty notices were given most books.