THE ORIGINAL NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE.
BY REV. EDGAR BUCKINGHAM.
The magazine which first bore this title was established in the year 1831, by Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham. There were not at that time many monthly periodicals in the country; it was long before the days of the Atlantic and Putnam's. The New-England originated in the desire of my brother Edwin, who, at that date, was just twenty-one years of age, to rise to a higher position than that of editor of a daily paper. He had been for some years connected with my father, first, as assistant editor of the New England Galaxy, and then of the Boston Courier. People estimate very differently now the position of the editor of one of our city dailies; but at that time, though such an editor had an influence and a very great one, he could not be said to rule so far in political and social life, and to be so nearly supreme, as he has since become through the talents and labors of the Bennetts, of Greeley, of Raymond, of Thurlow Weed, and of Samuel Bowles. It is true, Mr. Bryant, of the Evening Post, was already at his station, so was Joseph E. Chandler, of Philadelphia; and Gales and Seaton, of the National Intelligencer; and Nathan Hale also, of the Boston Advertiser, exerted an important influence, wherever that paper was read. But an editor now addresses every day ten thousand or a hundred thousand readers, where fifty years ago the issue of his paper was limited to little more than a thousand copies. My brother Edwin felt, apparently, that to be editor of a monthly magazine would bring him into closer connection and intimacy with the leading men of literary eminence throughout the country, and so the magazine was originated by him and by my father on his account.
Edwin was an accomplished writer at that early day. He had not learned the art at school; for he left school altogether when he was fourteen years of age. At that early period of life, he entered into the printing-office of the New England Galaxy, learning to set type, and, shortly, came to have charge of the making up of the paper. My father often said that the best school education one could get was at the compositor's stand. Edwin early began to write for the paper, and I remember, now, with what admiration an article of his on "Massachusetts" was read more than sixty years ago, and while he was yet a boy. The Galaxy was sold in 1827; and my father and brother gave themselves up more particularly to the editorship of the Courier. Before Edwin was twenty-one, he spent some winters in Washington, as special correspondent of the newspaper; and while there attracted no little attention from the great men of the nation. He was a young man of active habits, and during the trial of the Whites, at Salem, for the murder of Joseph White, in 1830, at which Mr. Webster made one of his most powerful efforts as a lawyer and advocate, Edwin reported the proceedings. He drove down to Salem in the morning, and back at night with the proceeds of his daily labor, over the cold and foggy marshes of Lynn. Then he took a cold, from the effects of which he never recovered. He used the severest remedies, and, in October, 1832, he sailed for Smyrna; after spending some months there in a home where friendship and kindness did all that nature and skill could accomplish, and finding all means ineffectual, he started for home to die; but a few days before reaching his native land he breathed his last. His remains were committed to the deep in May, 1833. A cenotaph at Mt. Auburn commemorates his birth and death. It bears the inscription of being placed there by "Boston Mechanics." Edwin believed in the mechanic arts, and in what are called laboring men. He had himself been of them. It was fitting also his monument should be reared at Mt. Auburn; it was one of the first stones erected there. He had been himself greatly instrumental in carrying to success the project of turning "Sweet" Auburn, as it had been called, into a cemetery where the ashes of the loved and illustrious might be gathered for a final resting-place.
The Magazine started well, and may be said to have been wholly successful, compared with other literary undertakings of the day, and with the just expectations of the proprietors. My father and brother had capable, willing, illustrious helpers. The first article of the first number was by Dr. Frothingham, of Boston, than whom no more elegant scholar, no finer writer was to be found in New England; Hon. Edward Everett contributed a playful article of some length to the same number. Hon. George S. Hillard, long known also in Boston for his fine scholarship, contributed a long review of the "Chanting Cherubs," a greatly admired piece of sculpture by Horatio Greenough then on exhibition in Boston. Hon. William Austin of Charlestown contributed a most ingenious and interesting story, not surpassed by fiction of the present day. Among the contributors to the first number were also Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Hon. Timothy Walker of Cincinnati; Rev. Leonard Withington of Newbury, Mass., a gentleman who lived long and quietly in that secluded village, but wielded a vigorous pen, and had a very thoughtful mind; his contribution was of a very kindly and wise article on the religious character of Lord Byron,—an article well worth republication as an introduction to any complete collection of the works of that great poet. One would say such a combination of the literary strength of Massachusetts was a good setting off for a new magazine.
The gentlemen above named, all or most of them, continued their contributions for other months and years. In addition to these whose names I have given, there were in succeeding numbers articles from Richard Hildreth, the historian, Park Benjamin, the poet, John G. Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Longfellow, Miss Hannah F. Gould, Dr. W. B. O. Peabody, of Springfield, Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, long known and honored and loved in his position in Cambridge as guardian and friend of the young men in college. But the list would be too long to enumerate all the fine scholars and eminent writers who gathered to make up the New England Magazine. My father and brother were very successful in securing the labors especially of young men,—my brother, because he was young himself,—my father, because always he was quick to discern rising merit, and ready and earnest to help forward young men to success and eminence. The list above given is that mostly of men who at that time were still in early youth.
The fifth volume of the Magazine, in July, 1833, records my brother's death and the solitude of the senior editor. The number is prefaced by a picture of my brother, which shows him as a handsome young man, at the age of twenty-two; but the lithograph cannot give his fair complexion, the clearness of his large blue eyes. It was accompanied by an elegiac poem, by Charles Sprague, well known then, and not forgotten since, as one of our most finished poets, and one of our most pathetic writers. The work that then devolved upon my father, not only as editor of a daily paper, but as a man of public activity and usefulness, member as he was for many years of the Legislature, chairman of committees, to whose reports he devoted an immensity of labor, was sufficient to require him to give up the Magazine. Besides its more strictly literary articles, contributed mostly by others, though my father wrote some of the literary articles himself, the Magazine presented every month a review of the public proceedings of Congress and of many of the State governments, the most of which, I think, were prepared by himself, and usually a long series of obituary notices. These last were of citizens of different parts of the country, and came undoubtedly from different hands. But of people of distinction, citizens of Boston, who died from 1831 to 1835, my father's pen probably produced almost all of the eulogies. The warmth of his friendship, his readiness to see all good, to forgive all imperfections, his skill as a writer, made such articles from his pen exceedingly interesting and admirable.
In December, 1834, my father wrote his valedictory, and on the first of January, 1835, announced that the proprietorship had passed into the hands of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and John O. Sargent, Esq. In looking over the papers of the seven volumes, which filled out my father's editorship, very many articles are found of the highest merit,—as the names of the contributors given above would assure the reader; and if some of inferior worth are at times mingled with them, they probably had some interest at the time they were written; and the Magazine on the whole would be pronounced, I suppose, worthy of general commendation.
It is the Nemesis of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at once.—Cornhill Magazine.