Abstract

The 'Nation's' Critics

The author's first connection with the periodical, the Nation as a contributor was when he was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and practicing law in Boston, Massachusetts and editing with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes the American Law Review. For a year, the author wrote continuously for the paper, sending an article every week from Cambridge, in 1868 or 1869. The author made the acquaintance of its editor, a source of lifelong friendship and instruction, through his brother-in-law, Charles Eliot Norton, who, as editor of the North American Review, had encouraged the author to try his hand at writing and who was one of the most interested promoters of and contributors to the Nation from the beginning. It was understood from the first, of course, that the Nation, was to be essentially different from any of other publications of which the United States had been and continues to be prolific. In turning over the pages of the first numbers, one is struck with the solidity of the literary criticism, and, at the same time, with the remoteness of the world in which it was produced.