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.”

It is well worth one’s while to look over the volumes of the “Anthology” to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how they expressed themselves.  The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that “The child,”—­meaning the new periodical,—­“shall not be destitute of the manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements.  He shall attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town shall furnish.”  The reader of the “Anthology” will find for his reward an improving discourse on “Ambition,” and a commendable schoolboy’s “theme” on “Inebriation.”  He will learn something which may be for his advantage about the “Anjou Cabbage,” and may profit by a “Remedy for Asthma.”  A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle “Studiosus” addresses to “Alcander.”  If the lines of “The Minstrel” who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from “The District of Main,” fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse “R.T.  Paine, Jr., Esq.,” of tameness when he exclaims:—­

  “Rise Columbia, brave and free,
  Poise the globe and bound the sea!”