SOURCE: Introduction to Minor Knickerbockers, American Book Company, 1947, pp. xliii-cx.

In the following excerpt, Taft provides a thoroughly documented examination of those Knickerbockers who succeeded the founders of the Group (Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant), discussing their theories and standards as well as their own work as the principal literary critics and writers of early nineteenth-century America.

Hamilton Wright Mabie on the Youthful Conduct of the Knickerbockers:

[Washington] Irving had loitered and dreamed on the water-front as a boy when he ought to have been at his books; and now, at the gateway of his career, the literary temperament turned him toward congenial fellowship rather than arduous study. There was plenty of material for comradeship in the town; and young men of spirit instinctively gathered about him. It was a very kindly and wholesome Bohemia in which they disported themselves in the halcyon days...