Bryant and his contemporaries, and much that "the inquisitive mind" would revel in to-day, was thus lost. The most famous, however, of the pioneer songs that the above quoted writer probably had in mind, The Hunters of Kentucky, the celebrated ballad of the Battle of New Orleans, has come down to us, but it was written by the alien hand of Samuel Woodworth, who achieved a double triumph over oblivion by also writing The Old Oaken Bucket. And were other "wooing songs of the hunter" extant, we would certainly discover that many of them were done by non-Kentuckians. Even Kentucky Belle, ballad of Morgan and his men, was the work of Constance Fenimore Woolson, the famous author of Anne.

In recent years the ballads of the Kentucky mountains have been investigated by a group of scholars, and Dr. Hubert Gibson Shearin will shortly publish a collection of them. It is impossible to discuss them at this time; and as nearly all of them are offshoots of the old English ballads and Scottish songs, done over by their Kentucky descendants, the ever-recurring question: "Are they Kentucky productions?" will not down.

II

THE KENTUCKY MAGAZINES

Kentucky has failed to produce and maintain a respectable literary magazine for any considerable length of time. Many magazines have been born in Kentucky with high hopes, and a few of them have braved the storms for a number of years, but all of them have gone the way of all the earth after a pathetic struggle for existence.

The reasons for this lie not far afield: the leading magazines and periodicals of the east through the immensity of their circulation secure that large patronage necessary to maintain a publication conducted on a generous basis, ensuring variety and excellence. Experience has long since demonstrated even to the bravest of the inland publishers that the point of distribution is the controlling factor in success. The means of transportation which have so miraculously improved, have annihilated distance and along with it to no small extent the Western and Southern periodical of literary flavor. The opulent publications are enabled through their very prosperity to command contributors not to be approached by a periodical circumscribed in means and constituency. Again, the Kentucky magazines have all along made the fatal mistake of truckling to dead prejudices and sectionalism. The material and the moulders have long been with us, but the wide popular support, which after all is the first essential, has failed to materialise, and it may be regretfully apprehended that it now lies as far away as ever.

The first magazine issued in Kentucky or the West was The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, for the year 1803, which was edited and published by Daniel Bradford, son of old John Bradford, the editor of The Kentucky Gazette. The Medley lived through the year of 1803, but in January, 1804, Editor Bradford announced that he was compelled, from lack of appreciation, to abandon its publication. The twelve parts were bound for those of the subscribers who cared to have them made into a single volume, and probably not more than two copies are extant to-day. The Medley's literary merit was not impressive, and its death can only be deplored because it happened to be the first Western magazine.

The Almoner, a religious periodical, the first issue of which was dated from Lexington, April, 1814, and which died a twelvemonth later, was published by Thomas T. Skillman, the pioneer printer. Its account of the preacher, John Poage Campbell, and his many theological works, is about all one finds of interest in it.

William Gibbes Hunt, a Harvard man, who later took a degree from Transylvania University, established The Western Review at Lexington, in August, 1819, and this was the first literary magazine in the West worthy the