The infancy of the _Evening Post_ coincided with the rise of the Knickerbocker school of letters, with which its relations were always intimate. Its first editor delighted in his old age to speak of his friendship with Irving, Halleck, Drake, and Paulding; while the second editor, Bryant, escaped inclusion with the Knickerbockers only by the fact that his poetry is too individual and independent to fit into any school at all. A mellow atmosphere hangs over the literary annals of New York early in the last century. We think of young Irving wandering past the stoops of quaint gabled houses, where the last representatives of the old Dutch burghers puffed their long clay pipes; or taking country walks within view of the broad Tappan Zee and the summer-flushed Catskills, halting whenever he could get a good wife to favor him with her version of the legends of the countryside. We think of that brilliant rainbow which Halleck stopped to admire one summer evening in front of a coffee-house near Columbia College, exclaiming: “If I could have my wish, it should be to lie in the lap of that rainbow and read Tom Campbell”; of Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and others of the “nine worthies” holding high revel in “Cockloft Hall” on the outskirts of Newark; and of Drake, the handsomest young man in town, like Keats studying medicine and poetry, and like Keats dying of consumption. We think of how the young men of the city were less interested in the news of Jena and Trafalgar than that Moore and Jeffrey had been arrested for fighting a duel, that Mr. Campbell had improved the leisure given him by a government pension by writing “Gertrude of Wyoming,” and that “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” was the work of a Scotch border sheriff.