Text: Anonymous, “[Review of the Southern Literary Messenger for July],” the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), August 21, 1835

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER. — The eleventh number of this Journal sustains the high promise of the preceding numbers. We know of no Magazine in the country which can compar with it in the amount of valuable matter it contains. A slight improvement also in typographical execution will render it faultless in that respect. When we say all this of a Southern periodical, and of one of so recent a standing as the Messenger, we can hardly believe that we have been able to say so much, and say it conscientiously. But we refer all who doubt us to the Magazine itself. Those who have been so long anxiously looking forward for some literary exertion on the part of the Old Dominion, will see in the columns of this excellent journal the promise of many future triumphs. We will endeavor to give a running comment on some of the principle articles. . . . The Visionary, a tale by Edgar A. Poe, sustains the high reputation the author has already won as a writer of fiction. The Visionary is decided one of his very best effusions.

Although the critical notices in the present number are not as numerous as usual, and include a very small portion of the current publications, still they are, we think, judicious and creditable to the editor. The poetry is not, upon the whole, equal to what we have hitherto notice in the Messenger. Some of the articles are below mediocrity — a few of them very far above it. . . .