It is interesting to find young Percy Bysshe Shelley confessing his obligations to the Philadelphia novelist, and saying that Brown's novels had influenced him beyond any other books. Traces of "Wieland" are to be found deeply stamped upon "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvyne." It is a singular chapter of literary history that records the progress of William Godwin's social theories and tales of horror across the Atlantic to an obscure house in Philadelphia and their return in a new literary form into the hands of William Godwin's son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself a poet of American descent.
The British magazines of 1804 contain flattering notices of Brown, and his novels were reprinted and read with interest and critical approval in England. At home he has fallen into undeserved oblivion, and the attempts in 1857 and 1887 to revive the interest in his works proved fruitless. His style had in it no elements of permanent life, but he was the first to discover the capabilities of romance in America, and used in all his books American characters and scenery.
Sir Walter Scott so greatly admired the works of the American novelist that he named the hero of Guy Mannering after him and gave to another of the characters of the same story the familiar name of "Arthur Mervyn."
Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815), a nephew of David Rittenhouse, and the successor of Benjamin Rush as professor of the theory and practice of medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, edited the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal from November 1, 1804, to May, 1807. It was published irregularly by J. Conrad and Co.
The Evening Fireside, or Literary Miscellany, Philadelphia, 1805-1806, was established by a literary club, and published by Joseph Rakestraw. The second volume, which began January 4, 1806, completed the work.
DRAMATIC MAGAZINES.
Notes on the stage and criticism of the drama had frequently been given place in the Port Folio, and Brown's Literary Magazine had published a farcical account of a "Theatrical Campaign" by Dick Buckram (Vol. I, p. 222), but the first magazine in America that attempted to take the theatre for its province was the Theatrical Censor, By a Citizen, first published in Philadelphia, December 9, 1805, and continued until November 17, 1806.
It was succeeded by the Theatrical Censor and Critical Miscellany, by Gregory Gryphon, Esq., Philadelphia, Saturday, October 11, 1806. Both these periodicals were issued during the theatrical season only, and the latter one was published in the interest of the theatres of Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Charleston. It was published on Saturdays, and made sixteen pages octavo.
The second Theatrical Censor was followed by the Thespian Mirror, in New York, edited by John Howard Payne, then a youth of fourteen years. Still later came the Boston Magazine and the Polyanthus.
Matthew Carey introduced the third theatrical journal to the Philadelphians. It was the Thespian Monitor and Dramatick Miscellany, by Barnaby Bangbar, Esq. (1809). It was begun Saturday, November 25, 1809. There is but a single issue of this publication in the British Museum, and its contents are almost entirely biographical. This copy was the property of John Howard Payne.