Cornelius Mathews, an ardent literary nationalist and social critic and a central figure in the group of young nationalistic writers known as "Young America," is remembered today less for any of his works than for the striking, if not to say unfortunate, impression he made in contemporary literary circles. From the late 1830s through the early 1850s, the period of his most significant literary activity, Mathews, as Perry Miller notes in The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (1956), "excited among his contemporaries a frenzy of loathing beyond the limits of rationality." Characterized by James Russell Lowell in A Fable for Critics (1848) as "a small man in glasses . . . dodging about, muttering 'Murderers! Asses!'" and as repeatedly "accusing of slavish respect to John Bull / All American authors who have more or less / Of that anti-American humbug--success," Mathews did...