Cornelius Mathews (28 October 1817-6 April 1889), an ardent literary nationalist and social critic and a central figure in the group of young nationalistic writers known as "Young America," is remembered today less for any of his works than for the striking, if not to say unfortunate, impression he made in contemporary literary circles. From the late 1830s through the early 1850s, the period of his most significant literary activity, Mathews, as Perry Miller notes in The Raven and the Whale, "excited among his contemporaries a frenzy of loathing beyond the limits of rationality." Characterized, apparently with more than a little accuracy, by James Russell Lowell in A Fable for Critics as "a small man in glasses ... dodging about, muttering 'Murderers! asses!'" and as repeatedly "accusing of slavish respect to John Bull / All American authors who have more or less / Of that anti-American humbug--success," Mathews was not one to...