Longfellow was not yet conspicuous.  Lowell was a school-boy.  Emerson was unheard of.  Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive.  Not one of the great histories, which have done honor to our literature, had appeared.  Our school-books depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant’s Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck’s Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake’s American Flag, and Percival’s Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,—­and not getting very wide awake, either.  These could be depended upon.  A few other copies of verses might be found, but Dwight’s “Columbia, Columbia,” and Pierpont’s Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled “Truth, a Gift for Scribblers,” which made some talk for a while, and is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones.  The “London Athenaeum” spoke of it as having been described as a “tomahawk sort of satire.”  As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners.  Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830.  He wrote an article on Bryant’s Poems for the “North American Review,” and another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk.  In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself.  It was an incident of a fight with the Osages.

“Standing by my father’s side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head.  Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my father.  He said nothing, but looked pleased.”

This little red story describes very well Spelling’s style of literary warfare.  His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very much like Black Hawk’s way of dealing with the Osage.  He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous epigrams.  Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one else escaped.