§14. "The Pennsylvania Magazine; The Royal American Magazine". VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775. Vol. 15. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.

VII. Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, 1704–1775.

§ 14. The Pennsylvania Magazine; The Royal American Magazine.

With the next magazines we are again on the eve of the revolution. “The town has met,” and we read instructions, articles, orations, odes, and satires on the situation, sometimes reprinted from the newspapers, sometimes written for the magazine, but always inflammatory, since the two noteworthy periodicals of this period, The Pennsylvania Magazine and The Royal American Magazine, were edited respectively by the two firebrands, Thomas Paine and Isaiah Thomas. Paine’s magazine did not lack pungent wit of one kind or another, although for the more strictly literary sections both he and Isaiah Thomas drew freely on conventional English sources which, in theory, they should have rejected. Thomas’s Royal American Magazine is enlivened by the famous Paul Revere engravings and is otherwise interesting, particularly for its confident belief in the new country soon to be the United States.