It was part of Coleman’s editorial creed to beat the big drum for American letters. Most of the Knickerbocker writers were themselves really provincial in literary matters, keeping always a nervous and envious eye upon England; for it was the period when, as Lowell puts it, we thought Englishmen’s thought, and with English salt on her tail our wild eagle was caught. This provincialism frequently expressed itself in an insistence that America was, not America, but a bigger England, and that the Hudson was not the Hudson, but a nobler Thames. Coleman thought it his duty to encourage native literature, and the amount of fifth-rate verse that was given patriotic praise in the _Evening Post_ is dismaying. The ode of Robert Treat Paine, jr., “Rule New England,” was commended with a warmth that owed something to Coleman’s intimacy with the elder Paine. Personal considerations also had their share in the flattering notice of Winthrop Sargent’s “Boston” the next year. Coleman was one of the few who has ever closed Peter Quince’s “Parnassian Shop” “with impressions favorable to the young author.” In 1805 he was struck by the “Democracy Unveiled” of Thomas Green Fessenden, a poetaster who had got some notice by writing a successful book while imprisoned for debt in Fleet Street, London. Francis Arden received favorable mention for a translation of Ovid, while another very minor bard, Richard B. Davis, who before his premature death had been a friend of Irving and Paulding, was generously praised in 1807. The _Post_ published a review of Pierpont’s “Airs of Palestine” by Henry Brevoort, Irving’s bosom friend, and pronounced it indispensable to any American library. It thought Halleck’s amusing satire on a New York merchant family in society, “Fanny,” a better poem than Byron’s “Beppo,” whose verse it imitated. Byron’s popularity at this time was such that when his “Mazeppa” was published in England, a copy was hurried to Philadelphia by the fast ship _Helen_, was placed in the printer’s hands at 2 p. m., and twenty-two hours later the volumes were issuing from the press complete and being rushed to the bookstores.