"From the exhibition of American talent I indulge the warmest expectations. I behold, in imagination, the Newtons, the Miltons and the Robertsons of this new world, and I behold the sun of genius pouring on our land his meridian beams. "In order to concentrate the force of her literature, the genius of America points to a National University, so warmly recommended, and remembered in his will, by our deceased friend and father. Such an establishment, far more than a pyramid that reached the clouds, would honor the name of Washington" (p. 81). The Philadelphia writers had their own little thrills, and their own little ambitions, and amid the poverty of their intellectual surroundings they refreshed themselves with visions of the giant things to come at large. James Hall, in his "Letters from the West," wrote: "The vicinity of Pittsburg may one day wake the lyre of the Pennsylvanian bard to strains as martial and as sweet as Scott; ... believe me, I should tread with as much reverence over the mausoleum of a Shawanee chief, as among the catacombs of Egypt, and would speculate with as much delight upon the site of an Indian village as in the gardens of Tivoli, or the ruins of Herculaneum." American critics soon caught the contagion of sneering censure, and caused the _Port Folio_ to say, in 1811: "American critics seem, in almost all cases, to have entered into a confederacy to exterminate American poetry. If an individual has the temerity to jingle a couplet, and to avow himself descended from Americans, the offence is absolutely unpardonable." When Fenimore Cooper published his first novel, he suppressed his name and wrote instead, "PRECAUTION, by _an Englishman_." Still, a notable feature of the American magazines was a general insistence upon or, perhaps, a preference for subjects out of American history, or articles dealing with what might be called American archaeology--sketches of the life and character of "the ancients of these lands"--or, at least, contributions that were tricked out in some local garb or color. The minds of young American writers turned with alacrity to the subjects that lay nearest to them and which were intimately connected with the life of the country. A national literature was never altogether absent from their thoughts, however the fear of English censure or ridicule may have checked the aspiration. John Webbe, in his prospectus to the first American magazine, said that the new venture would be "an attempt to erect on neutral principles a publick theatre in the centre of the British Empire in America" (_Amer. Weekly Mercury_, October 30, 1740).