John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston.  Him I reconstruct from scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice.  Mild Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to the interests of learning.

William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the “Monthly Anthology,” and that of the “North American Review,” for he was a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the founder of the second.  Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of his “Letters on the Eastern States,” as a scholar and a gentleman, an impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a correct writer.  Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and character.

Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the “Anthology” was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty.  He contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various controversial sermons, and writing the “Memoir of Buckminster.”

There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities.  There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship.  The “Anthology” was the literary precursor of the “North American Review,” and the theological herald of the “Christian Examiner.”  Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity.  It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings.  It had Magazine ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of Laura Matilda’s sentimentalities.  It talked about “the London Reviewers” with a kind of provincial deference.  It printed articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the Magazines of to-day.  But it had opinions of its own, and would compare well enough with the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” to say nothing of “My Grandmother’s Review, the British.”  A writer in the third volume (1806) says:  “A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our country.  I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our ‘Anthology,’ however superior such publications may now be in that kingdom.”