When, near the close of the year 1870, Dr. J. G. Holland started _Scribner’s Monthly_, American letters entered upon a new stage of its development. The literary field was then occupied by the poets, humorists, and essayists of the Pfaff school, dwelling under the perpetual shadow of the Bonnerian maxims, and the occasional one of pecuniary depression; also a few men of the James Parton type who knew not Bohemia, and women writers like Mrs. Dallas. It must be remembered that at this time no signatures were allowed in the Harpers’ publications, and the matter published in the _Monthly_ was either of foreign manufacture or else prepared in the Franklin Square Foundry by poets employed by the week at fair but not exorbitant wages. The _Ledger_ principles were observed here to a certain extent, but were not enforced as rigidly as they were by Mr. Bonner in his own establishment. I think, myself, that the Pfaff poets were more directly accountable for the introduction of the Bonnerian maxims than were the Harpers themselves, because they had become so accustomed to eliminate stepmothers, sisters, fast trotters, and other objectionable features from their work that they had come to regard them as quite as much outside the pale of ordinary fiction as if they were dwellers on the planet Mars. Moreover a poem or story constructed on the Bonner plan might, if rejected by the Harpers, still prove acceptable to the _Ledger_. From the very first Dr. Holland showed a commendable purpose to raise the tone of the new _Monthly_ above that of Mr. Bonner’s story-paper, and although we see distinct evidences, in his earlier numbers, of _Ledger_ influences, it was not long before a gradual emancipation from the strictest and most literal interpretation of Mr. Bonner’s iron-clad rules began. Horses soon began to strike a swifter gait in the serial stories, and in “Wilfred Cumbermede” one of these quadrupeds has the hardihood to throw its rider over its head. But that would never have happened if George Macdonald had been trained in the modern _Ledger_ school of fiction. Looking over these old numbers in the light of ripened knowledge, I can see Dr. Holland slowly groping his way along an untrodden pathway leading from the _Ledger_ office to the broad fields of literature, where our magazine barons hold undisputed sway. That he kept a watchful eye on his rural subscribers is shown by an extended illustrated article on Fairmount Park, and another one descriptive of Philadelphia--subjects which possess about as much interest for metropolitan readers as that masterpiece of bucolic romance, _The Opening of a Chestnut Burr_. Among the writers whose names appear in these numbers are Alice Cary, Edward Eggleston, J. T. Headley, and Washington Gladden--all graduates or disciples of the great _Ledger_ school.