American Authors and British Reviewers 1798-1826

W\IIJILLIAM B. CAIRNS studied the attitudes of British periodicals IVY toward American authors more than fifty years ago,' but when he finished the second of his two pioneer studies in I922, there were not only no lists of reviews and general articles such as the one which follows, but there was no identification of the periodicals themselves and no union lists to indicate where they might be seen. The list which follows expands Cairns's list of reviews and articles by perhaps fifty per cent and hence opens up new opportunities for investigation, both of individual authors and of American literature generally. Much more remains to be done both before and after the dates here covered,2 but that which is offered is submitted in the belief that it provides a small aperture for viewing the past and that this aperture is worthy of great enlargement so that those vast archives of the past-our periodicals and our newspapers, both British and American-can be investigated fully for the first time. Without the necessary bibliographical aids, however, the job will never be done except in incomplete and piecemeal fashion, and as a result a vast store of information will remain all but untouched. As Thomas De Quincey so well said a century and a half ago, Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration . . . without end-confounded with the rubbish and purgamenta of ages. Some guide to identify those treasures is necessary or they may never be seen. The task is indeed a big one, but perhaps some insight and encouragement is provided by the statement which John Shaw Billings is said to have made to the Librarian of the Royal Society of Medicine: I'll let you in on a secret: there's nothing

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