Rise of Metropolitan Jonrna/is>n 453 cial and advertisement bulletins, like the Gazette or the Commercial Advertiser, could count perhaps a larger circulation, which scarcely reached in either case a daily issue of two thousand copies ; but these papers never aspired to represent public sentiment. For that honor, there was brisk competition between the Courier and En- quirer and the Journal of Commerce, both sixpenny morning papers, and both catering to the political tastes of the mercantile classes. The Evening Post rested on a narrower basis. It was, as it has always been, the favorite of the small cultivated class, and it had already been immortalized by the famous " Croaker " literature of Fitz Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The paper passed in 1829 from the hands of the dying Coleman into the control of William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant. These two editors, both young and ardent, and both poets, were happily described in the columns of the Courier and Enquirer as " the chanting cherubs of the Post" a title which clung to them for years. Under Mr. Bryant, who became the responsible editor in 1836, the Post naturally perfected that literary flavor which it had ac- quired from the doctrinaire Coleman and the brilliant Leggett. Mr. Bryant was neither a great journalist nor a politician. The force of the Post as a «,?if.fpaper was small, and its political influence was necessarily limited. Mr. Bryant's best service to journalism was his consistent exposition of the ideals of a scholarly and culti- vated gentleman ; but his professional brethren and rivals were often angered by his didactic tone, and made unkind allusions to the phy- lacteries of the Pharisees. Mr. Bryant's catholic moderation of judgment lent to his polit- ical opinions a noteworthy consistency in conservatism. To Van Buren democracy the Evening Post was attached without variable- ness or shadow of turning. Satisfied with the general principles of that party concerning free-trade, slavery and hard-money, Bryant and the Post blindly followed all the Van Burenite twistings through- out the Free Soil period, and finally fell with the rest of the anti- slavery democrats into the yet inchoate mass of the Republican party. Throughout the-whole era of the war, it represented the sentiment of that democratic element in the new party. Since the war it has returned with that same clientage to its old political affini- ties, a most remarkable instance of permanence in the political rela- tions of a metropolitan newspaper. The Courier and Enquirer, in 1829, was the property of James Watson Webb, a wealthy, hot-headed young aristocrat, who would have been more congenially placed among the fire-eaters of the Palmetto State than in democratic New York. The possession
