Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/334

Mrs. Glasse. When, with the years, the past rose in value, Philadelphia gave to America an antiquary, and John Watson, with his Annals, set a fashion in Philadelphia that had to wait a good half century for followers. And when the writer was multiplied all over the country and the reader with him, Philadelphia provided the periodical, the annual, the parlour-table book, that the one wrote for and the other subscribed to—an endless succession of them: The Casket, The Gift, The Souvenir, which I have no desire to disturb on their obscure shelves; the Philadelphia Saturday Museum, and Burtons Gentleman's Magazine, to me the emptiest of empty names; Sartain's Union Magazine, which I might as well be honest and say I have never seen; Graham's, in its prime, unrivalled, unapproached; Godey's Lady's Book, offering its pages alike to the newest verse and the latest mode, the popular magazine that every American saw at his dentist's or his doctor's, edited by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, for a woman, then as always, could get where she chose, if she had the mind to, without the help of arson and suicide; Peterson's, which I recall only in its title; Lippincott's, in my time the literary test or standard in Philadelphia and scrupulously taken in by the Philadelphia householder. I can see it still, lying soberly on the centre table in the back parlour of the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, never defaced or thumbed, I fancy seldom opened, but like everything in the house, like my Grandfather himself, a type, a symbol