ABSTRACT
A steadily growing reputation for almost twenty years, justified by the gradually increasing evidence of those latent, exhaustless, ever-unfolding energies which belong to genius, has inwoven the name of Simms with the literature of America, and made it part of the heirloom which our age will give to posterity. William Gilmore Simms is the second, and only surviving, of three brothers, sons of William Gilmore Simms, and Harriet Ann Augusta Singleton. His father was of a Scotch-Irish family, and his mother of a Virginia stock, her grandparents having removed to South Carolina long before the Revolution, in which they took an active part on the Whig side. There are few writers who have exhibited such versatility of powers, combined with vigor, originality of copious and independent ideas, and that faculty of condensation which frequently by a single pregnant line suggests an expansive train of reflection.
