Bryant brought to his editorship a culture such as American journalism had not seen before, and has not since seen surpassed. A writer in _Fraser’s Magazine_ in 1855 made sport of the ignorance of American newspapers. He cited the _Herald’s_ statement, in a criticism of Racine’s “Phedre,” that “the language is written in what we call blank verse”; and its translation of a tag from Virgil: “Adsum qui feci; he or me must perish.” His sweeping criticism was unjust to a profession which already enlisted men like Richard Hildreth, Richard Grant White, and George Ripley, but Bryant, with his international reputation, was the most shining exception to it. His readers thought nothing of seeing an editorial on the United States Bank begin with an allusion to the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Virgil, some story drawn from the legal lore he had mastered at the bar, or an apt quotation from the wide range of English poetry. His allusions and illustrations were always deft. “Like the misshapen dwarf in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’” he said of the anti-Jacksonians in 1833, “they wave their lean arms on high and run to and fro crying, ‘Lost! Lost! Lost!’” When Cass objected to any “temporary” measures regarding slavery in the territories, Bryant simply retold the story of Swift’s servant, who did not clean his master’s shoes because they would soon be dirty again; whereupon the Dean punished him by making him go without breakfast, because he would soon be hungry again. The editor read assiduously. His wide acquaintance with the most intellectual men of New York kept him conversant with the latest ideas in every field. Above all, at a time when few journalists went abroad, his many trips to Europe supplied him with a constant fund of suggestions for civic and other improvements. These ranged from penny postage to street cleaning machines, from apartment houses to police uniforms, and from Central Park to the nickel five-cent piece, which, in imitation of a German coin, he was one of the first to advocate. Bryant’s insistence upon purity of diction was such that John Bigelow believed that in all his writings for the _Post_ fewer blemishes could be found than in the first ten numbers of the _Spectator_. His sensitiveness as to literary form was fully developed when he joined the paper. On May 11, 1827, he published in it a paragraph on affectations of expression, condemning such barbarisms in current newspapers as “consolate.” The most famous evidence of his love of precision was his _index expurgatorius_. This was less extensive than it was sometimes represented to be, containing but eighty-six words or phrases; and as Bryant told George Cary Eggleston, it was for the guidance only of immature staff writers, and might sometimes be overstepped. It includes inflated words like inaugurate for begin, misemployed words like mutual for common, and along with some terms now used without hesitation, others universally condemned: