A discussion of the Philadelphia magazines takes us back to a time when Philadelphia led all the cities of the country in culture, in commerce, in statecraft and in authorship. Every new experiment in literature was first tried in Philadelphia. Her's was the first monthly magazine (January, 1741), and her's, too, the first daily newspaper (_Amer. Daily Advertiser_, December 21, 1784). The first religious magazine was _Sauer's Geistliches Magazien_ (1764)--for which Christopher Sauer cast his own type, the first made in America--and the first religious weekly was _The Religious Remembrancer_ (September 4, 1813). Philadelphia led off with the first penny paper (_The Cent_) in 1830; and the first mathematical journal (_The Annulus_), and the first _Juvenile Magazine_ (1802), and the first illustrated comical paper on an original plan, _The John Donkey_, in 1848, were all Philadelphia adventures. There is scarcely a notable name in the literature of America that is not in some way connected with the Philadelphia magazines. Dennie and Brown, the first professional men-of-letters on this continent, were Philadelphia editors. Washington Irving edited the _Analectic Magazine_. James Russell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe and Bayard Taylor were editorial writers on _Graham's Magazine_, and John Greenleaf Whittier edited _The Pennsylvania Freeman_. Bryant and Cooper and Longfellow and Hawthorne and a hundred lesser men were constant contributors to the Philadelphia journals. A striking difference between the older magazines and the recent ones is the conspicuous absence from the journal of a century ago of what is commonly called "light literature." Magazines were then conducted by scholars for scholars. "Popular" essays and silly novels had not yet depraved the taste of readers who could relish Somerville and Shenstone, Savage and Johnson. Articles appeared monthly in the _Port Folio_ that could not by any chance win recognition from an editor of these days. One of the favorite amusements of the _Port Folio_ gentlemen was the translation of Mother Goose melodies and alliterative nursery rhymes into Latin, and especially into Greek. These curious translations, in which the object was to preserve in the Greek, as far as possible, the verbal eccentricities of "butter blue beans" and other intricate verses of infantile memory, are scattered up and down the pages of the _Port Folio_, together with fresh versions of Horace and dissertations upon classical rhetoric. But the curtain has fallen on all this scholastic bravery. The dust of a dry antiquity has settled upon the laborious pages of these ragged tomes, undisturbed save by some "local grubber," or by some "illustrator" in search of portraits for a rich man's library.