Robert Walsh, Baltimore and Philadelphia editor and literary critic, was one of America's most important men of letters in the first three and a half decades of the nineteenth century. He founded America's first quarterly review, was the leading apologist for America in the nationalistic paper war between the American and British press following the War of 1812, was the fugleman for Scottish Common Sense aesthetics and classicism in American criticism, and introduced a new literary journalism in the daily press. Most of his literary criticism appeared in essays and reviews in a half dozen journals that he edited in Philadelphia. Edgar Allan Poe spoke for many of Walsh's contemporaries when he said, "He is one of the finest writers, one of the most accomplished scholars, and when not in too great a hurry, one of the most accurate thinkers in the country."

Robert Walsh, Jr., born in Baltimore...