In Philadelphia, Cobbett advocated the extremest Tory principles, and requested the contributors to his paper, "whether they write on their business or mine, to pay the postage, and place it to my account. This is a regulation I have been obliged to adopt to disappoint certain Democratic blackguards, who, to gratify their impotent malice and put me to expense, send me loving epistles full of curses and bawdry."
During the prevalence of the plague, Cobbett ejected his venomous superfluity upon Dr. Benjamin Rush, comparing him to Doctor Sangrado, in Gil Blas, because he advocated blood-letting as a remedy for the fever. Rush, stung into retaliation, sued Cobbett, and recovered from him five thousand dollars. This, together with an additional three thousand dollars, the cost of the suit, ruined Cobbett, and he removed to Bustleton, August 29, 1799, where he continued for a short time to publish his "Gazette," weekly. The last barbed arrow, quivering with scorn, was fired from Bustleton, January 13, 1800, and the author returned to England.
Cobbett also published, in Philadelphia, The Political Censor, or Monthly Review, which lasted from March, 1796, to March, 1797.
A German magazine was published in Philadelphia, in 1798: Philadelphisches Magazin für die deutschen in Amerika. Philadelphia: H. and J. R. Kämmerer.
The Dessert to the True American measures a year from July, 1798 to July, 1799.
The last magazine published in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century was the Philadelphia Magazine and Review, or Monthly Repository of Information and Amusement. It was begun in January, 1799, and printed for Benjamin Davies, 68 High Street. In announcing this work, the editor alluded to the unsuccess that had attended all efforts to establish magazines in Philadelphia, and he believed the cause to be the spurious patriotism that led the editors to reject whatever was not of native production. The magazine was strongly "anti-Gallican" in character. It closed its career with its first volume.
I have made no mention in this necessarily incomplete enumeration of the eighteenth century magazines of an early religious publication, The Royal Spiritual Magazine, by Joseph Crukshank, 8vo, 1771. A few stray numbers exist, but I have never seen a copy of it. How long it was published I do not know.
Christopher Sauer printed, at irregular intervals, in 1764, the Geistliches Magazien. There are fifty numbers in the first volume. Sauer cast his own type, and this magazine is therefore printed, as he himself says on page 136 of the second volume, with the first type made in America.