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A Manual
of
American Literature

Edited by
Theodore Stanton, M.A. (Cornell)
In Collaboration with
Members of the Faculty of
Cornell University

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1909

Copyright, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

TO
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THIS
MEMORIAL VOLUME
IS DEDICATED
IN TOKEN OF HIGH REGARD AND ADMIRATION.

TAUCHNITZ.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

This book has been prepared for publication as No. 4000, a “Memorial Volume,” of the “Tauchnitz Edition.” Perhaps it may be well to explain to American readers what the “Tauchnitz Edition” is and what a “Memorial Volume” is in this collection.

The “Collection of British Authors,” or, as it is more popularly known on the European Continent, the “Tauchnitz Edition,” was instituted in 1841, at Leipsic, by one of the most distinguished of German publishers, the late Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz, whose son is now at the head of the house. The father records that he was “incited to the undertaking by the high opinion and enthusiastic fondness which I have ever entertained for English literature: a literature springing from the selfsame root as the literature of Germany, and cultivated in the beginning by the same Saxon race.... As a German-Saxon it gave me particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as possible beyond the limits of the British Empire.” In another place, Baron Tauchnitz describes “the mission” of his Collection to be the “spreading and strengthening the love for English literature outside of England and her Colonies.”

Baron Tauchnitz early felt that the general title of the series, “Collection of British Authors,” was a misnomer, which might even give offence to an important branch of the English-speaking race; for, though Bulwer and Dickens led off in the Collection, “Pelham” being the first volume issued and “The Pickwick Papers” the second, the fourth volume, added at the beginning of the second year of publication, in 1842, was Fenimore Cooper’s “The Spy,” followed in the same year by a second volume of the same author. Furthermore, the year 1843 opened with Washington Irving’s “Sketch Book,” immediately followed by a third novel by Cooper; and, though it was not till 1850 that another American work gained admittance into this charmed circle, not fewer than three of Irving’s books succeeded one another in the single twelvemonth. In 1852, Hawthorne was welcomed with “The Scarlet Letter” and Mrs. Stowe with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; from that time on, scarcely a year has passed without some new American book being included in the Collection, and under the present routine each year’s issue, comprising some seventy-five volumes, includes several American works.

In fact, the representation of American authors in the “Tauchnitz Edition” is now so considerable that the list calls for a place by itself at the end of this volume, where it presents an interesting evidence of the growth of the popularity of American literature in Europe. The reader will notice that there are cases where some of the best works of an author are not included in the “Tauchnitz Edition.” The cause of these omissions is sometimes other than taste or choice. But the catalogue is suggestive just as it stands.

The “Memorial Volumes” form a little series of special issues published at turning-points. This Manual has been made a Memorial Volume out of compliment to American literature and is dedicated, with his permission, to President Roosevelt. In this way, the present Baron Tauchnitz has striven to show his high appreciation of the group of American authors in the Edition, and to follow in the footsteps of his high-minded father.

In his Preface to the first Memorial Volume, No. 500, entitled “Five Centuries of the English Language and Literature,” being a collection of characteristic specimens of British writers from Wycliffe to Thomas Gray, the first Baron Tauchnitz refers to the literature “on the other side of the Atlantic,” and says in a footnote to this Preface: “A glance at my list of authors will show that America has contributed no small part to my Collection. Nevertheless I did not deem it necessary to alter the title under which my undertaking was started, as I thought that the term ‘British Authors’ might not improperly be applied to writers employing the language common to the two nations on either side of the Atlantic.” No. 1000—Tischendorf’s edition of The New Testament—is dedicated “to my English and American Authors,” while in No. 2000—“Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, with a Glance at the Past”—the author, the late Professor Henry Morley, who long filled the chair of English Literature at the University of London, opens his Preface with these words: “When Baron Tauchnitz asked me to write this little book, he also wished me to include in it some record of the literature of America. But Baron Tauchnitz cordially agreed to a suggestion that the kindred literature of America, though we are proud in England to claim closest brotherhood with our fellow-countrymen of the United States, has a distinct interest of its own, large enough for the whole subject of another memorial volume, and that an American author would best tell the story of its rise and progress.”

Another work in the “Tauchnitz Edition,” but not a Memorial Volume, offered a good opportunity to present American literature to the attention of the European public. I refer to the two volumes of the late George L. Craik, sometime Professor of English Literature at Queen’s College, Belfast, entitled “A Manual of English Literature, and of the History of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest; with Numerous Specimens.” Here again no space is given to our authors, though they are mentioned once in a reference to “the leading poetical writers who have arisen in the American division of the English race, two or three of whom may be reckoned as of the second rank, though certainly not one as of the first.”

Towards the end of 1893, as the time was approaching for the issuing of No. 3000, and again, in 1900, when No. 3500 was soon to be reached, I hinted to my Leipsic friends the peculiar fitness of singling out one of these possible Memorial Volumes and making it a sketch of our literary life, in accordance with the promise made in Professor Morley’s Preface. I even suggested that Professor Moses Coit Tyler, who had then just completed his great work on our literature, be invited to perform the task. The last letter I ever received from this genial spirit, dated from the Isle of Wight, September 5, 1897, contains this passage: “I appreciate the honour you have done me in mentioning my name to Baron Tauchnitz, in connection with a proposed volume on American literature.” Nothing, however, came of this; and when, some ten years later, I was invited to prepare the present volume, my first thought was to utilise the magnum opus of Professor Tyler, who had, in the meanwhile, passed away. So my chief care has been the first two chapters, drawn, with the kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and of the family of Professor Tyler, from his four authoritative volumes, “A History of American Literature during the Colonial Period,” and “The Literary History of the American Revolution,” to which Sir George Otto Trevelyan refers in his “American Revolution” as “a remarkable specimen of the historical faculty.”

The chief labour in the preparation of this volume has fallen upon my friends and collaborators of the Department of English and the Sage School of Philosophy of my Alma Mater. Acknowledgment is, further, particularly due to Professors J. M. Hart and M. W. Sampson, also of Cornell University, for valuable suggestions and considerable help. The work of seeing the American edition through the press has been done by Professors Northup and Cooper.

Theodore Stanton.

Paris, September, 1908.

CONTENTS.

Colonial Literature
and
The Literature of the Revolutionary Period

A Manual of American Literature

COLONIAL LITERATURE

I. FIRST PERIOD (1607–1676)

The Beginning.—The present race of Americans who are of English lineage—that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion of the American people of to-day—are the direct descendants of the crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century. Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that century in which American civilisation had its planting; even as its training into some maturity and power has been the business of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most of the men who produced American literature during that period were immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture. Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply enter into the meaning of American literature in its later forms without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed, at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to claim it likewise as a part of English literature. Indeed England and America are joint proprietors of this first tract of the great literary territory which we have undertaken to survey.

Since the earliest English colonists upon these shores began to make a literature as soon as they arrived here, it follows that we can fix the exact date of the birth of American literature. It is that year 1607, when Englishmen, by transplanting themselves to America, first began to be Americans. Thus may the history of our literature be traced back from the present hour, as it recedes along the track of our national life, through the early days of the republic, through five generations of colonial existence, until, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is merged in its splendid parentage—the written speech of England.

The First Writer.—Among those first Englishmen huddled together behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the foundations of American literature, and there was one who still has a considerable name in the world. When he first set foot in Virginia, Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. This extremely vivid and resolute man comes before us for study, not because he was the most conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but because he was the writer of the first book in American literature. A True Relation of Virginia is of deep interest to us, not only on account of its graphic style and the strong light it throws upon the very beginning of our national history, but as being unquestionably the earliest book in American literature. It was written during the first thirteen months of the life of the first American colony, and gives a simple and picturesque account of the stirring events which took place there during that time, under his own eye. After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. As a writer his merits are really great—clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible.

William Strachey.—During the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, The Tempest. It was in May, 1610, that Sir Thomas Gates, with two small vessels and 150 companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and in July, 1610, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.

George Sandys.—The last one of this group of early writers, George Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here who was a professed man of letters. He was well known as a traveller in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This fragment was a specimen of literary workmanship in many ways creditable; and that he was able, during the next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble translation of the fifteen books, is worthy of being chronicled among the heroisms of authorship. In 1626, he brought out in London, in a folio volume, the first edition of his finished work. The writings which precede this book in our literary history were all produced for some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship, and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and, second, as a specimen of fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense our own, and to honour as the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the New World.

The Burwell Papers.—In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians, and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s Rebellion. With this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes curiously involved.

In the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the King and Parliament with their most valuable rights, suddenly there swept toward them the terror of an aggressive Indian war. The people called upon the royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, to take the necessary measures for repelling these assaults. For reasons of jealousy, indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice, this Governor gave to the people promises of help, and promises only. Then the people arose in their anger, and since their Governor would not lead them to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was a natural leader and king of men. He obeyed the call of the people and led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his head; and the people who followed him were put under ban. Then followed a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon and the Governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died, suddenly and mysteriously, and twenty-five persons were hung or shot.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, it was discovered that in an old and honourable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel Bacon. These manuscripts are sometimes called the Burwell Papers, from the name of a family in King William County by whom they were first given to the public. The author of the prose portion of these manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. But apart from the disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings, they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes with no little energy and life; and the flavour of mirth which seasons them is not unpleasant.

As the cause of Bacon’s death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it secretly in the earth. And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that, upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was bemoaned in lines drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial-place.” Of course this statement is but a blind; the author of such a eulogy of the dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben Jonson.

Early Literature in Virginia and New England.—During the first epoch in the history of American literature, there were but two localities which produced in the English language anything that can be called literature,—Virginia and New England. As we have seen, there were in Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, authors who produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from the uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those writers of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, “the Apostle of Virginia,” flitted back to England after a brief residence in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to identify himself permanently with her fate, and to live and die in her immediate service. This, as we shall see, is in startling contrast to the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in her soil.

New England Traits in the Seventeenth Century.—Did the people of New England in their earliest age begin to produce a literature? Who can doubt it? With their incessant activity of brain, with so much both of common and of uncommon culture among them, with intellectual interests so lofty and strong, with so many outward occasions to stir their deepest passions into the same great currents, it would be hard to explain it had they indeed produced no literature. Moreover, contrary to what is commonly asserted of them, they were not without a literary class. In as large a proportion to the whole population as was then the case in the mother-country, there were in New England many men trained to the use of books, accustomed to express themselves fluently by voice and pen, and not so immersed in the physical tasks of life as to be deprived of the leisure for whatever writing they were prompted to undertake. It was a literary class made up of men of affairs, country-gentlemen, teachers, above all of clergymen; men of letters who did not depend upon letters for their bread, and who thus did their work under conditions of intellectual independence.

For the study of literature, they turned with eagerness to the ancient classics; read them freely; quoted them with apt facility. Though their new home was but a province, their minds were not provincial: they had so stalwart and chaste a faith in the ideas which brought them to America as to think that wherever those ideas were put into practice, there was the metropolis. In the public expression of thought they limited themselves by restraints which, though then prevalent in all parts of the civilised world, now seem shameful and intolerable: the printing-press in New England during the seventeenth century was in chains. The first was set up at Cambridge in 1639, under the auspices of Harvard College; and for the subsequent twenty-three years the president of that college was in effect responsible for the good behaviour of the terrible machine. His control of it did not prove sufficiently vigilant. The fears of the clergy were excited by the lenity that had permitted the escape into the world of certain books which tended “to open the door of heresy”; therefore, in 1662 two official licensers were appointed, without whose consent nothing was to be printed. Even this did not make the world seem safe; and two years afterward the law was made more stringent. Other licensers were appointed; excepting the one at Cambridge no printing-press was to be allowed in the colony; and if from the printing-press that was allowed, anything should be printed without the permission of the licensers, the peccant engine was to be forfeited to the government and the printer himself was to be forbidden the exercise of his profession. But even the new licensers were not severe enough. In the leading colony of New England legal restraints upon printing were not entirely removed until about twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence.

The chief literary disadvantages of New England were, that her writers lived far from the great repositories of books, and far from the central currents of the world’s best thinking; that the lines of their own literary activity were few; and that, though they nourished their minds upon the Hebrew Scriptures and upon the classics of the Roman and Greek literatures, they stood aloof, with a sort of horror, from the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their own tongue. In many ways their literary development was stunted and stiffened by the narrowness of Puritanism. Nevertheless, what they lacked in symmetry of culture and in range of literary movement, was something which the very integrity of their natures was sure to compel them, either in themselves or in their posterity, to acquire.

William Bradford.—William Bradford, of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called the father of American history. After he had been in America ten years and had seen proof of the permanent success of the heroic movement in which he was a leader, his mind seems to have been possessed by the historic significance of that movement; and thenceforward for twenty years he gave his leisure to the composition of a work in which the story of the settlement of New England should be told in a calm, just, and authentic manner. The result was his History of Plymouth Plantation. There is no other document upon New England history that can take precedence of this either in time or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events that had passed under his own eye, and that had been shaped by his own hand; and he had every qualification of a trustworthy narrator. His mind was placid, grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books and of many languages; and being thus developed both by letters and by experience, he was able to tell well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself during his own strenuous and benignant career. His history is an orderly, lucid, and most instructive work; it contains many tokens of its author’s appreciation of the nature and requirements of historical writing; and though so recently—1855—published in a perfect form, it must henceforth take its true place at the head of American historical literature, and win for its author the patristic dignity that we have ascribed to him.

John Winthrop.—In the early spring of 1630, a fleet of four vessels sailed out into the sea from a beautiful harbour in the Isle of Wight, their prows pointed westward. On board that fleet were the greatest company of wealthy and cultivated persons that have ever emigrated in any one voyage from England to America. They were prosperous English Puritans. Foremost among them in intellectual power and in weight of character was John Winthrop, already chosen Governor of the Massachusetts Company, and qualified by every personal trait to be the conductor and the statesman of the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. Immediately upon going on board ship he began a piece of writing, which he continued to work at not only during the rest of the voyage but during the rest of his life, and which is a treasure beyond price among our early historic memorials,—The History of New England. His plan was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in America. For almost twenty years the story went forward, from 1630 until a few weeks before the writer’s death in 1649. It is quite evident that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full purpose of having it published as a history; but he wrote it amid the hurry and weariness of his unloitering life, with no anxiety about style, with no other purpose than to tell the truth in plain and honest fashion. There is one portion of this History that has acquired great celebrity: it is the one embodying Winthrop’s speech, in 1645, in the general court, on his being acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy-governor. One passage of it, containing Winthrop’s statement of the nature of liberty, is of pre-eminent merit, worthy of being placed by the side of the weightiest and most magnanimous sentences of John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A distinguished American publicist has declared that this is the best definition of liberty in the English language, and that in comparison with it what Blackstone says about liberty seems puerile.[1]

Descriptions of Nature.—A delightful group of writings belonging to our earliest age is made up of those which preserve for us, in the very words of the men themselves, the curiosity, the awe, the bewilderment, the fresh delight, with which the American Fathers came face to face for the first time with the various forms of nature and of life in the New World. Examples of this class of writings were produced by the early men of Virginia; and among the founders of New England there was no lack of the same sensitiveness to the vast, picturesque, and novel aspects of nature which they encountered upon the sea and the land, in their first journeys hither. The evidence of this fact is scattered thick through all their writings, in letters, sermons, histories, poems; while there remain several books, written by them immediately after their arrival here, describing in the first glow of elated feeling the vision that unfolded itself before them of the new realms of existence upon which they were entering.

Theological Writers.—Without doubt, the sermons produced in New England during the colonial times, and especially during the seventeenth century, are the most authentic and characteristic revelations of the mind of New England for all that wonderful epoch. The theological and religious writings of early New England may not now be readable; but they are certainly not despicable. They represent an enormous amount of subtile, sustained, and sturdy brain-power. They are, of course, grave, dry, abstruse, dreadful; to our debilitated attentions they are hard to follow; in style they are often uncouth and ponderous; they are technical in the extreme; they are devoted to a theology that yet lingers in the memory of mankind only through certain shells of words long since emptied of their original meaning. Nevertheless, these writings are monuments of vast learning, and of a stupendous intellectual energy both in the men who produced them and in the men who listened to them. Of course they can never be recalled to any vital human interest. They have long since done their work in moving the minds of men. Few of them can be cited as literature. In the mass, they can only be labelled by the antiquarians and laid away upon shelves to be looked at occasionally as curiosities of verbal expression, and as relics of an intellectual condition gone for ever. They were conceived by noble minds; they are themselves noble. They are superior to our jests. We may deride them, if we will; but they are not derided.

Of all the great preachers who came to New England in our first age, there were three who, according to the universal opinion of their contemporaries, towered above all others,—Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton. These three could be compared with one another; but with them could be compared no one else. They stood apart, above rivalry, above envy. In personal traits they differed; they were alike in bold and energetic thinking, in massiveness of erudition, in a certain overpowering personal persuasiveness, in the gift of fascinating and resistless pulpit oratory.

“The Simple Cobbler of Agawam.”—Soon after his arrival in Massachusetts, Nathaniel Ward became minister to a raw settlement of Puritans at Agawam, the beautiful Indian name of that district, afterward foolishly exchanged for Ipswich. Early in 1645, he commenced writing the remarkable book, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, which will keep for him a perpetual place in early American literature. It had the good fortune to fit the times and the passions of men; it was caught up into instant notice, and ran through four editions within the first year. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam may be described as a prose satire upon what seemed to the author to be the frightful license of new opinions in his time, both in New England and at home; upon the frivolity of women and the long hair of men; and finally upon the raging storm of English politics, in the strife then going forward between sects, parties, Parliament, and King. It is a tremendous partisan pamphlet. After all, the one great trait in this book which must be to us the most welcome, is its superiority to the hesitant, imitative, and creeping manner that is the sure sign of a provincial literature. The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators—writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials.

Roger Williams.—From his early manhood even down to his late old age, Roger Williams stands in New England a mighty and benignant form, always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the rectification of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance toward men’s bodies or souls. He became an uncompromising Separatist. By the spectacle of the white men helping themselves freely to the lands of the red men, he became an assailant of the validity, in that particular, of the New England charters. Roger Williams also held that it was a shocking thing—one of the abominations of the age—for men who did not even pretend to have religion in their hearts, to be muttering publicly the words of religion with their mouths; and that such persons ought not to be called on to perform any acts of worship, even the taking of an oath. Finally, he held another doctrine, that the power of the civil magistrate “extends only to the bodies and goods and outward state of men,” and not at all to their inward state, their consciences, their opinions. For these four crimes, particularly mentioned by Governor Haynes in pronouncing sentence upon him, Massachusetts deemed it unsafe to permit such a nefarious being as Roger Williams to abide anywhere within her borders.

The illustrious Westminster Assembly of Divines had been in session since July, 1643. Already the Presbyterians in it had come to hard blows with the Congregationalists in it, with respect to the form of church government to be erected in England upon the ruins of the Episcopacy. On that subject Roger Williams had a very distinct opinion. While some were for having the new national church of this pattern, and others were for having it of that, Roger Williams boldly stepped two or three centuries ahead of his age, and affirmed that there should be no national church at all. Putting his argument into the differential form of mere questions, he published, in 1644, what he called Queries of Highest Consideration. This, of course, was stark and dreadful heresy; but it was heresy for which Roger Williams had already suffered loss and pain, and was prepared to suffer more. Above all, his nature had become absolutely clear in its adjustment of certain grand ideas, of which the chief was liberty of soul. On behalf of that idea, having now an opportunity to free his mind, he resolved to do so, keeping nothing back; and accordingly, almost upon the heels of the little book that has just been mentioned, he sent out another—not a little one; a book of strong, limpid, and passionate argument, glorious for its intuitions of the world’s coming wisdom, and in its very title flinging out defiantly a challenge to all comers. He called it The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. His book reached in due time the library of John Cotton, and stirred him up to make a reply, which bore a title reverberating that given by Roger Williams to his book: The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb. Cotton’s book quickly found Roger Williams, at his home in Rhode Island, and of course aroused him to write a rejoinder. Its title is a reiteration of that given to his former work, and is likewise a characteristic retort upon the modification made of it by his antagonist: The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavour to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. This book is the most powerful of the writings of Roger Williams. There are three principal matters argued in it,—the nature of persecution, the limits of the power of the civil sword, and the tolerance already granted by Parliament.

With Roger Williams, the mood for composition seems to have come in gusts. His writings are numerous; but they were produced spasmodically and in clusters, amid long spaces of silence. He is known to have written two or three works which were never printed at all, and which are now lost. In 1652, he published, in addition to his rejoinder to John Cotton, two small treatises. From that time, no book of his was given to the press until the year 1676, when he published at Boston a quarto volume of nearly 350 pages, embodying his own report of a series of stormy public debates, which he had held in Rhode Island, not long before, with certain robust advocates of Quakerism. This book bears a punning title, George Fox Digged out of his Burrows. Besides those of his writings that were intended for books, there are many in the form of letters, some addressed to the public, most of them to his personal friends. In these letters, which cover his whole life from youth to old age, we seem to get very near to the man himself.

Puritanism and Poetry.—A happy surprise awaits those who come to the study of the early literature of New England with the expectation of finding it altogether arid in sentiment, or void of the spirit and aroma of poetry. The New Englander of the seventeenth century was indeed a typical Puritan; and it will hardly be said that any typical Puritan of that century was a poetical personage. In proportion to his devotion to the ideas that won for him the derisive honour of his name, was he at war with nearly every form of the beautiful. He himself believed that there was an inappeasable feud between religion and art; and hence the duty of suppressing art was bound up in his soul with the master-purpose of promoting religion. Hence, very naturally, he turned away likewise from certain great and splendid types of literature,—from the drama, from the playful and sensuous verse of Chaucer and his innumerable sons, from the secular prose writings of his contemporaries, and from all forms of modern lyric verse except the Calvinistic hymn. Nevertheless, the Puritan did not succeed in eradicating poetry from his nature. Of course, poetry was planted there too deep even for his theological grub-hooks to root it out. Though denied expression in one way, the poetry that was in him forced itself into utterance in another. If his theology drove poetry out of many forms in which it had been used to reside, poetry itself practised a noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology. Though he stamped his foot in horror and scorn upon many exquisite and delicious types of literary art, yet the idea that filled and thrilled his soul was one in every way sublime, immense, imaginative, poetic. How resplendent and superb was the poetry that lay at the heart of Puritanism, was seen by the sightless eyes of John Milton, whose great epic is indeed the epic of Puritanism.

Turning to Puritanism as it existed in New England, we may perhaps imagine it as solemnly declining the visits of the Muses of poetry, sending out to them the blunt but honest message—“Otherwise engaged.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an extraordinary fact about these grave and substantial men of New England, especially during our earliest literary age, that they all had a lurking propensity to write what they sincerely believed to be poetry,—and this, in most cases, in unconscious defiance of the edicts of nature and of a predetermining Providence. It is impressive to note, as we inspect our first period, that neither advanced age, nor high office, nor mental unfitness, nor previous condition of respectability, was sufficient to protect any one from the poetic vice. Here and there, even a town-clerk, placing on record the deeply prosaic proceedings of the selectmen, would adorn them in the sacred costume of poetry. Remembering their unfriendly attitude towards art in general, this universal mania of theirs for some forms of the poetic art—this unrestrained proclivity toward the “lust of versification”—must seem to us an odd psychological freak. Or, shall we rather say that it was not a freak at all, but a normal effort of nature, which, being unduly repressed in one direction, is accustomed to burst over all barriers in another? As respects the poetry which was perpetrated by our ancestors, it must be mentioned that a benignant Providence has its own methods of protecting the human family from intolerable misfortune; and that the most of this poetry has perished.

Anne Bradstreet.—There was, however, belonging to this primal literary period, one poet who, in some worthy sense, found in poetry a vocation. The first professional poet of New England was a woman. In the year 1650 there was published, in London, a book of poems written by a gifted young woman of the New England wilderness, Anne Bradstreet by name. She was born in England, in 1612. She was the laborious wife of a New England farmer, the mother of eight children, and herself from childhood of a delicate constitution. The most of her poems were produced between 1630 and 1642, that is, before she was thirty years old; and during these years she had neither leisure, nor elegant surroundings, nor freedom from anxious thoughts, nor even abounding health. Somehow, during her busy lifetime, she contrived to put upon record compositions numerous enough to fill a royal octavo volume of 400 pages,—compositions which entice and reward our reading of them, two hundred years after she lived.

II. SECOND PERIOD (1676–1765)

The Two Periods.—I have taken the year 1676 as the year of partition between the two periods into which our colonial age seems to fall. Before 1676, the new civilisation in America was principally in the hands of Americans born in England; after 1676, it was principally in the hands of Americans born in America, and the subjects of such training as was to be had here. Our first colonial period, therefore, transmits to us a body of writings produced by immigrant Americans; preserving for us the ideas, the moods, the efforts, the very phrases of the men who founded the American nation; representing to us, also, the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture formed in the Old World. Our second colonial period does more: it transmits to us a body of writings, produced in the main by the American children of those immigrants, and representing the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture that was itself formed in the New World.

Our first colonial period, just seventy years long, we have now briefly examined. For my part, I have no apology to make for it: I think it needs none. It was a period principally engaged in other tasks than the tasks of the pen; it laid, quietly and well, the foundation of a new social structure that was to cover a hemisphere, was to give shelter and comfort to myriads of the human race, was to endure to centuries far beyond the gropings of our guesswork. Had it done that deed alone, and left no written word at all, not any man since then could have wondered; still less could any man have flung at it the reproach of intellectual lethargy or neglect. But if, besides what it did in the founding of a new commonwealth, we consider what it also did in the founding of a new literature—the muchness of that special work, the downright merit of it—we shall find it hard to withhold from that period the homage of our admiration.

From the year 1676, when our first colonial period ends, there stretches onward a space of just eighty-nine years, at the end of which the American colonies underwent a swift and portentous change,—losing, all at once, their colonial content, and passing suddenly into the earlier and the intellectual stage of their struggle for independence. This space of eighty-nine years forms, of course, our second colonial period.

New England Verse-Writers.—Urian Oakes, born in 1631, was reared in the woods of Concord. The splendid literary capacity of this early American—this product of our pioneer and autochthonous culture—is seen in this: as his sermons are among the noblest specimens of prose to be met with, in that class of writings, during the colonial time, so the one example that is left to us of his verse reaches the highest point touched by American poetry during the same era. The poem thus referred to is an elegy upon the death of a man to whom the poet seems to have been bound by the tenderest friendship,—a poem in fifty-two six-lined stanzas; not without some mechanical defects; blurred also by some patches of the prevailing theological jargon; yet, upon the whole, affluent, stately, pathetic; beautiful and strong with the beauty and strength of true imaginative vision.

In contemporaneous renown, far above all other verse-writers of the colonial time, was Michael Wigglesworth, the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of the Five Points of Calvinism; a poet who so perfectly uttered in verse the religious faith and emotion of Puritan New England that, for more than a hundred years, his writings had universal diffusion there, and a popular influence only inferior to that of the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. No one holding a different theology from that held by Michael Wigglesworth can do justice to him as a poet, without exercising the utmost intellectual catholicity. His verse is quite lacking in art; its ordinary form being a crude, swinging ballad-measure, with a sort of cheap melody, a shrill, reverberating clatter, that would instantly catch and please the popular ear, at that time deaf to daintier and more subtile effects in poetry. In the multitude of his verses, Michael Wigglesworth surpasses all other poets of the colonial time, excepting Anne Bradstreet. Besides numerous minor poems, he is the author of three poetical works of considerable length. One of these, God’s Controversy with New England, was “written in the time of the great drought,” 1662. The argument of the poem is this: “New England planted, prospered, declining, threatened, punished.” The poet holds the opinion, common enough in his day, that before the arrival of the English in America, this continent had been the choice and peculiar residence of the Devil and his angels. Another large poem of Wigglesworth’s is Meat out of the Eater; or, Meditations concerning the Necessity, End, and Usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children, all tending to prepare them for and comfort them under the Cross. Here we have simply the Christian doctrine of comfort in sorrow, translated into metrical jingles. It was first published, probably, in 1669; ten years afterward, it had passed through at least four editions; and during the entire colonial age, it was a much-read manual of solace in affliction. But the masterpiece of Michael Wigglesworth’s genius, and his most delectable gift to an admiring public, was that blazing and sulphurous poem, The Day of Doom; or, A poetical Description of the great and last Judgment. This great poem, which, with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any literature, Christian or pagan, had for a hundred years a popularity far exceeding that of any other work, in prose or verse, produced in America before the Revolution. The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of The Day of Doom by at least every thirty-fifth person then in New England,—an example of the commercial success of a book never afterward equalled in this country. Since that time, the book has been repeatedly published; at least once in England, and at least eight times in America—the last time being in 1867.

The Dynasty of the Mathers.—At the time of his arrival in Boston—August, 1635—Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age; a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. This man, “the progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,” and the first of a line of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits that distinguished his family through so long a period;—great physical endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally, the homiletic gift. His numerous writings were, of course, according to the demand of his time and neighbourhood;—sermons, a catechism, a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government, several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book, and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body of that work.

Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June 21, 1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in graceful recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favoured the country about the time of his nativity.” Even in childhood he began to display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare of eighty-four mortal years. In 1657, on his eighteenth birthday, he preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon. From 1661 to 1664 he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and the North Church of Boston. At last, in 1664, he consented to be made minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America. Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,—a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens. As to learning, he even exceeded all other New Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. His power as a pulpit-orator was very great. It was a common saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete preacher.” From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have considerable merit. The publications of Increase Mather defy mention, except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works would include at least ninety-two titles. Of all the great host of Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth,—the book commonly known by a name not given to it by the author, Remarkable Providences. It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or sky, any messenger whatever who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with his mouth full of marvels.

In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph, composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:

Under this stone lies Richard Mather,
Who had a son greater than his father,
And eke a grandson greater than either.

This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American, excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The most famous book produced by him—the most famous book, likewise, produced by any American during the colonial time—is Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698. The Magnalia is, indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”—the two volumes of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. The Magnalia has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversations, touches of description, traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together that it is never possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight. The true place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we say that he was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most disagreeable representative of the Fantastic School in literature; and that he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;—these are the traits of Cotton Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its last great apostle.

Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706. In him, evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things; but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an imitative one. He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last, and the least, of the Mathers.

The Laity in New England Literature.—In the history of literature in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above all others,—the intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that, too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was in every sense honourable, both for the leaders and the led. It was not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a leadership, it was an honour even to be among the followers. And in the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the clergy filled by far the largest space, because, in all departments of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work. After the first half-century of New England life, another fact comes into notice,—the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time, many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not remaining in it, began to organise and to develop the other learned professions—the legal, medical, and tuitionary—and, appealing to the public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily than any other,—the profession of journalism.

The Almanac.—No one who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac. The earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next after a sheet containing The Freeman’s Oath, the first production that came from the printing-press in this country was An Almanac calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce, and printed at Cambridge, in 1639. Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over that solitary printing-press at Cambridge without receiving a similar salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to send forth almanacs—a trade in which, in the following century, it was to acquire special glory. In 1697, New York entered the same enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode Island was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia was in 1731. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called Poor Richard’s Almanac, to which his own personal reputation has given a celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even literary merit. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and frequent perusal.

History and Biography in New England.—The one form of secular literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of New England had the most authentic vocation is history. Our second literary period produced four considerable historians,—William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two excelling in popularity all other historians of the colonial time; the last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic work. Of that species of history which is devoted to the lives of individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens produced in the colonial epoch. But it is a singular fact that, in literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are far inferior to its histories.

Pulpit Literature in New England.—In our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England,—their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. The immigrant clergy of New England—the founders of this noble and brilliant order—were, in nearly all qualities of personal worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their time, in the mother-country,—mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints. And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all the essential elements of that ancient civilisation out of which they came; and, at once, to raise up and educate, in the New World, a line of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.

Jonathan Edwards.—Jonathan Edwards, the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America, was born in 1703; in 1758 he was installed as president of the College of New Jersey, and died a few weeks afterward. Both by his father and by his mother, he came of the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished him,—spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity, disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is, perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion, in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to literature—especially the literature of imagination and of wit—he would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes, all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the end of time.

III. GENERAL LITERARY FORCES IN THE COLONIAL TIME

Colonial Isolation.—The study of American literature in the colonial time is the study of a literature produced, in isolated portions, at the several local seats of English civilisation in America. Before the year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many American peoples. At the various centres of our colonial life—Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts—there were, indeed, populations of the same English stock; but these populations differed widely in personal and social peculiarities—in spirit, in opinion, in custom. The germs of a future nation were here, only they were far apart, unsympathetic, at times even unfriendly. No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralising life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own fashion. In general, the characteristic note of American literature in the colonial time is, for New England, scholarly, logical, speculative, unworldly, rugged, sombre; and as one passes southward along the coast, across other spiritual zones, this literary note changes rapidly toward lightness and brightness, until it reaches the sensuous mirth, the satire, the persiflage, the gentlemanly grace, the amenity, the jocular coarseness, of literature in Maryland, Virginia, and the farther South.

Colonial Fellowship.—On the other hand, the fact must not be overlooked that, while the tendency toward colonial isolation had its way, throughout the entire colonial age, there was also an opposite tendency—a tendency toward colonial fellowship—that asserted itself even from the first, and yet at the first faintly, but afterward with steadily increasing power as time went on; until at last, in 1765, aided by a fortunate blunder in the statesmanship of England, this tendency became suddenly dominant, and led to that united and great national life, without which a united and great national literature here would have been for ever impossible. This august fact of fellowship between the several English populations in America—a fellowship maintained and even strengthened after the original occasion of it had ceased—has perhaps saved the English language in America from finally breaking up into a multitude of mutually repellent dialects; it has certainly saved American literature from the pettiness of permanent local distinctions, from fitfulness in its development, and from disheartening limitations in its audience. Besides these general causes leading toward colonial union,—kinship, religion, commerce, dependence on the same sovereign, peril from the same enemies,—there were three other causes that may be described as purely intellectual—the rise of journalism, the founding of colleges, and the study of physical science. They worked strongly for the development of that intercolonial fellowship without which no national literature would ever have been born here, and, also, were in themselves literary forces of extraordinary importance.

Early American Journalism.—The first newspaper ever published in America appeared in Boston in 1690, and was named Public Occurrences. For the crime of uttering “reflections of a very high nature,” it was immediately extinguished by the authorities of Massachusetts,—not even attaining the dignity of a second number. Under this rough blow, the real birth of American journalism hesitated for fourteen years. On April 4, 1704, was published in Boston the first number of an American newspaper that lived. It was called The Boston News-Letter. For fifteen years, it continued to be the only newspaper in America. At last, on December 21, 1719, a rival newspaper was started, named The Boston Gazette; and on the twenty-second day of the same month, in the same year, there appeared in Philadelphia the first newspaper published in this country outside of Boston. This was called The American Weekly Mercury. From that time onward, the fashion of having newspapers spread rapidly. Nearly all of these newspapers were issued once each week; many of them were on diminutive sheets; and for a long time all of them clung to the prudent plan of publishing only news and advertisements, abstaining entirely from the audacity of an editorial opinion, or disguising that dangerous luxury under pretended letters from correspondents. News from Europe,—when it was to be had,—and especially news from England, occupied a prominent place in these little papers; but, necessarily, for each one, the affairs of its own colony, and next, the affairs of the other colonies, furnished the principal items of interest. Thus it was that early American journalism, even though feeble, sluggish, and timid, began to lift the people of each colony to a plane somewhat higher than its own boundaries, and to enable them, by looking abroad, this way and that, upon the proceedings of other people in this country, and upon other interests as precious as their own, to correct the pettiness and the selfishness of mere localism in thought. Colonial journalism was a necessary and a great factor in the slow process of colonial union. Besides this, our colonial journalism soon became, in itself, a really important literary force. It could not remain for ever a mere disseminator of public gossip, or a placard for the display of advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression. Moreover, each editor was surrounded by a coterie of friends, with active brains and a propensity to utterance; and these constituted a sort of unpaid staff of editorial contributors, who, in various forms,—letters, essays, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, lampoons,—helped to give vivacity and even literary value to the paper.

Our early journalism, likewise, included publications of a more explicit literary intention than the newspapers; publications in which the original work was done with far greater care, and in which far more space was surrendered to literary news and literary criticism, and to the exercise of many sorts of literary talent. The generic name for these publications is the magazine; and the first one issued in this country was by Benjamin Franklin, at Philadelphia, in 1741. By far the most admirable example of our literary periodicals in the colonial time was The American Magazine, published at Philadelphia from October, 1757, to October, 1758, and conducted, according to its own announcement, “by a society of gentlemen.”

Early American Colleges.—No other facts in American history are more creditable to the American people than those which relate to their early and steady esteem for higher education, and especially to their efforts and their sacrifices in the founding of colleges. Before the year 1765, seven colleges were established here: Harvard, in 1636; William and Mary, in 1693; Yale, in 1700; New Jersey, in 1746; King’s—now Columbia—in 1754; Philadelphia—now the University of Pennsylvania—in 1755; Rhode Island—now Brown University—in 1764. Though all these little establishments bore the name of colleges, there were considerable differences among them with respect to the grade and extent of the instruction they furnished,—those founded latest being, in that particular, the most rudimental. Nevertheless, at them all one noble purpose prevailed,—the study of the ancient classics. This extraordinary training in the ancient languages led to forms of proficiency that have no parallel now in American colleges. So early as 1649, President Dunster wrote to Ravius, the famous Orientalist, that some of the students at Harvard could “with ease dexterously translate Hebrew and Chaldee into Greek.” In 1678, there was in that college even an Indian student who wrote Latin and Greek poetry; and this accomplishment continued to be an ordinary one there as late as the Revolutionary War; while the facile use of Latin, whether for conversation or for oratory, was so common among the scholars of Harvard and of Yale as to excite no remark. Nearly all the superior men in public life, after the immigrant generation, were educated at these little colleges; and in all the studies that then engaged the attention of scholars in the Old World, these men, particularly if clergymen, had a scholarship that was, in compass and variety, fully abreast of the learning of the time. The existence here of these early colleges was in many ways a means of colonial fellowship. Each college was itself, in all portions of the country, a point of distinction for its own colony; at each college were gathered some students from other colonies; between all the colleges there grew a sense of fraternity in learning and letters, and this re-enforced the general sense of fraternity in civic destinies; finally, at these colleges was trained no little of that masterly statesmanship of our later colonial time, which, at a glance, interpreted the danger that hung upon the horizon in 1765, proclaimed the imminent need of colonial union, and quickly brought it about. The vast influence that our early colleges exerted upon literary culture can hardly be overstated. Among all the people, they nourished those spiritual conditions out of which, alone, every wholesome and genuine literature must grow; and in their special devotion to classical studies, they imparted to a considerable body of men the finest training for literary work that the world is yet possessed of. It was of incalculable service to American literature that, even in these wild regions of the earth, the accents of Homer, of Thucydides, of Cicero, were made familiar to us from the beginning; that a consciousness of the æsthetic principle in verbal expression was kept alive here, and developed, by constant and ardent study of the supreme masters of literary form; and that the great, immemorial traditions of literature were borne hither across the Atlantic from their ancient seats, and were here housed in perpetual temples, for the rearing of which the people gladly went to great cost. The tribute of most eloquent homage, which, in 1775, in the House of Lords, the Earl of Chatham paid to the intellectual force, the literary symmetry, and the decorum of the state-papers then recently transmitted from America, and then lying upon the table of that House, was virtually an announcement to Europe of the astonishing news,—that, by means of an intellectual cultivation formed in America, in its own little colleges, on the best models of ancient and modern learning, America had already become not only an integral part of the civilised world, but even a member of the republic of letters.

The Study of Physical Science in America.—The study of physical science in this country began with the very settlement of the country. The writings of the first Americans are strewn with sharp observations on the geography of America, on its minerals, soils, waters, plants, animals; on its climates, storms, earthquakes; on its savage inhabitants, its diseases, its medicines; and on the phenomena of the heavens as they appeared to this part of the earth. There were here, even in our earliest age, several men of special scientific inclination, such as William Wood, John Josselyn, John Sherman, John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and John Winthrop of Connecticut. Indeed, the latter was recognised as an eminent physicist even among the contemporaneous physicists of England; and in Connecticut, where he founded the city of New London, and where he was for many years Governor, he pursued with great zeal his scientific researches, carrying them even into the fatal chase for the philosopher’s stone. He was on terms of endearing intimacy with Watkins, Robert Boyle, and other great leaders of science in England; and it is said that under the menace of public calamities there, and drawn, likewise, by their friendship for Winthrop, these men had proposed to leave England, and to establish in the American colony over which Winthrop presided “a society for promoting natural knowledge.” They were, however, induced by Charles II. to remain in England; and accordingly, with the co-operation of Winthrop, who happened to be in London at the time, they founded there, instead of in New London, the association that soon became renowned throughout the world as the Royal Society. Perhaps there was no one of these early American students of nature whom it is now pleasanter to recall than the Quaker naturalist, John Bartram. Born in Pennsylvania, in 1701, he founded near Philadelphia the first botanic garden in America. He was appointed American botanist to George III., and won from Linnæus the praise of being “the greatest natural botanist in the world.” As John Bartram represents high attainments in science reached under all outward disadvantages, so John Winthrop of Harvard College represents still higher attainments in science reached under all outward advantages. A descendant of the first Governor of Massachusetts, from 1738 until his death in 1779 he served his Alma Mater with great distinction as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. For extent and depth of learning in his special departments, he was probably the foremost American of his day. All things considered, he was probably the most symmetrical example both of scientific and of literary culture produced in America during the colonial time; representing what was highest and broadest in it, what was most robust and most delicate; a thinker and a writer born and bred in a province, but neither in thought nor in speech provincial; an American student of nature and of human nature, who stayed at home, and bringing Europe and the universe to his own door, made himself cosmopolitan.

Thus, from the earliest moment of American civilisation, there were, here and there in this country, eager and keen students of nature,—their number greatly multiplying with the passing of the years. But it belongs to the essence of such studies that they who pursue them should seek the fellowship of their own brethren, either for help in solving difficulties or for delight in announcing discoveries; and it is, beyond question, true that the union of the American colonies was first laid in the friendly correspondence and intellectual sympathies of students of physical science, who from an early day were dispersed through these colonies. By the year 1740, the American students of nature had become a multitude; and from that year to the year 1765, the glory of physical research among us culminated in the brilliant achievements of Benjamin Franklin, whose good fortune it then was to enable his country to step at once to the van of scientific discovery, and for a few years to be the teacher of the world on the one topic of physical inquiry then uppermost in men’s thoughts. In proposing the formation of the American Philosophical Society, this wonderful man had announced to his own countrymen that the time had come for them to make new and greater exertions for the enlargement of human knowledge. Inspired by the noble enthusiasm of Franklin, whose position brought him into large personal acquaintance in all the colonies, the activity and the range of scientific studies in America were then greatly increased,—a bond of scientific communion that helped to prepare the way for political communion, whenever the hour for that should come. The direct impulse given by all this eager study of physical science to the development of American literature is to be seen not only in scientific writings like those of Winthrop and of Franklin, which have high and peculiar literary merit, but in the general invigoration of American thought, in the development of a sturdy rational spirit, and in a broadening of the field of our intellectual vision.

But, in spite of all these influences working toward colonial fellowship, the prevailing fact in American life, down to the year 1765, was colonial isolation. With that year came the immense event that suddenly swept nearly all minds in the several colonies into the same great current of absorbing thought, and that held them there for nearly twenty years. From the date of that event, we cease to concern ourselves with an American literature in the East or the South, in this colony or in that. Henceforward American literature flows in one great, common stream, and not in petty rills of geographical discrimination,—the literature of one multitudinous people, variegated indeed, in personal traits, but single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

I. A GENERAL VIEW

The Three Stages.—In the intellectual process of the American Revolution, are to be observed three well defined stages of development on the part of the men who began and carried through that notable enterprise. The first stage—extending from the spring of 1763 to the spring of 1775—represents the noble anxiety which brave men must feel when their political safety is imperilled, this anxiety, however, being deepened in their case by a sincere and even a passionate desire, while roughly resisting an offensive ministerial policy, to keep within the bounds of constitutional opposition, and neither to forsake nor to forfeit that connection with the mother-country which they then held to be among the most precious of their earthly possessions. The second stage—extending from the spring of 1775 to the early summer of 1776—represents a rapidly spreading doubt, and yet at first no more than a doubt, as to the possibility of their continuing to be free men without ceasing to be English colonists. This doubt, of course, had been felt by not a few of them long before the day of the Lexington and Concord fights; but under the appalling logic of that day of brutality, it became suddenly weaponed with a power which mere words never had,—the power to undo swiftly, in the hearts of a multitude of liegemen, the tie of race, the charm of an antique national tradition, the loyalty, the love, and the pride of centuries. The third stage—extending from the early summer of 1776 to the very close of the whole struggle—represents a final conviction, at least on the part of a working majority of the American people, that it would be impossible for them to preserve their political rights and at the same time to remain inside the British Empire,—this conviction being also accompanied by the resolve to preserve those rights whether or no, and at whatsoever cost of time, or effort, or pain.

Of course, the intellectual attitude of the Loyalists of the Revolution—always during that period an immense and a very conscientious minority—correlated to that of the Revolutionists in each one of these three stages of development: in the first stage, by a position of qualified dissent as to the gravity of the danger and as to the proper method of dealing with it; in the second and third stages, by a position of unqualified dissent, and of implacable hostility, as regards the object and motive and method of the opposition which was then conducted by their more masterful fellow-countrymen.

The Predominant Note.—The chief trait of American literature during the period now under view is this: its concern with the problems of American society, and of American society in a peculiar condition—aroused, inflammable, in a state of alarm for its own existence, but also in a state of resolute combat for it. The literature which we are thus to inspect is not, then, a literature of tranquillity, but chiefly a literature of strife, or, as the Greeks would have said, of agony; and, of course, it must take those forms in which intellectual and impassioned debate can be most effectually carried on. The literature of our Revolution has almost everywhere the combative note; its habitual method is argumentative, persuasive, appealing, rasping, retaliatory; the very brain of man seems to be in armour; his wit is in the gladiator’s attitude of offence and defence. It is a literature indulging itself in grimaces, in mockery, in scowls: a literature accented by earnest gestures meant to convince people, or by fierce blows meant to smite them down. In this literature we must not expect to find art used for art’s sake.

Our next discovery is the rather notable one that such a period actually had a literary product very considerable in amount. Even in those perturbed years between 1763 and 1783, there was a large mass of literature produced in America. More than with most other epochs of revolutionary strife, our epoch of revolutionary strife was a strife of ideas: a long warfare of political logic; a succession of annual campaigns in which the marshalling of arguments not only preceded the marshalling of armies, but often exceeded them in impression upon the final result. An epoch like this, therefore,—an epoch in which nearly all that is great and dear in man’s life on earth has to be argued for, as well as to be fought for, and in which ideas have a work to do quite as pertinent and quite as effective as that of bullets,—can hardly fail to be an epoch teeming with literature, with literature, of course, in the particular forms suited to the purposes of political co-operation and conflict.

We shall be much helped by keeping in mind the distinction between two classes of writings then produced among us: first, those writings which were the result of certain general intellectual interests and activities apart from the Revolutionary movement, and, secondly, those writings which were the result of intellectual interests and activities directly awakened and sustained by that movement. The presence of the first class we discover chiefly in the earlier years of this period, before the Revolutionary idea had become fully developed and fully predominant; and, again, in the later years of the period, when, with the success of the Revolution assured, the Revolutionary idea had begun to recede, and men’s minds were free to swing again toward the usual subjects of human concern, particularly toward those which were to occupy them after the attainment of independence and of peace.

Literary Centres.—We shall find, within the first decade of this period and before its culmination into the final violence of the Revolutionary controversy, the beginnings of a new and a truer life in America. Of this new literary life there were, in general, two chief centres, one in the New England, one in the Middle Colonies. The New England literary centre was at New Haven, and was dominated by the influence of Yale College, within which, especially between 1767 and 1773, was a group of brilliant young men passionately devoted to the Greek and Roman classics, and brought into contact with the spirit of modern letters through their sympathetic study of the later masters of English prose and verse. The foremost man in this group was John Trumbull.

The new literary life of the Middle Colonies had its seat in the neighbourhood of New York and Philadelphia, and was keenly stimulated by the influence of their two colleges, and also by that of the College of New Jersey under the strong man—Witherspoon—who came to its presidency in 1768. The foremost representative of this new literary tendency was Philip Freneau, a true man of genius, the one poet of unquestionable originality granted to America prior to the nineteenth century. Of him and of his brother poet in New England, it is to be said that both began to do their work while still in youth; both seemed to have a vocation for disinterested literature in prose as well as in verse; both were reluctantly driven from that vocation by the intolerable political storm that then burst over the land; both were swept into the Revolutionary movement, and, thenceforward, the chief literary work of both was as political satirists. From about the year 1774, little trace of an æsthetic purpose in American letters is to be discovered until after the close of the Revolution.

Classification of the Revolutionary Writings.—The characteristic life of the period we now have in view was political, and not political only, but polemic, and fiercely polemic, and at last revolutionary; and its true literary expression is to be recognised in those writings, whether in prose or in verse, which gave utterance to that life. Such writings seem naturally to fall into nine principal classes.

First, may here be named the correspondence of the time; especially, the letters touching on public affairs which passed between persons in different portions of America, and in which men of kindred opinions found one another out, informed one another, stimulated, guided, aided one another, in the common struggle. Indeed, the correspondence of our Revolution, both official and unofficial, constitutes a vast, a fascinating, and a significant branch of its literature. Undoubtedly, the best of all the letter-writers of the time was Franklin; and next to him, perhaps, were John Adams, and Abigail Adams, his wife. Indeed the letters of Mrs. Adams, mostly to her husband, and covering this entire period, are among the most delightful specimens of such work as done by any American. Not far behind these first three letter-writers, if indeed they were behind them, must be mentioned Jefferson and John Dickinson; and, for shrewdness of observation, for humour, for lightness of touch, for the gracious negligée of cultivated speech, not far behind any of them was a letter-writer now almost unknown, Richard Peters of Philadelphia. Of course, no one goes to the letters of Washington, in the expectation of finding there sprightliness of thought, flexibility, or ease of movement; yet, in point of diligence and productiveness, he was one of the great letter-writers of that age.

The second form of literature embodying the characteristic life of our Revolutionary era is made up of those writings which were put forth at nearly every critical stage of the long contest, either by the local legislatures, or by the General Congress, or by prominent men in public office, and which may now be described comprehensively as State Papers. It is probable that we have never yet sufficiently considered the extraordinary intellectual merits of this great group of writings, or the prodigious practical service which, by means of those merits, they rendered to the struggling cause of American self-government, particularly in procuring for the insurrectionary colonists, first, the respectful recognition, and then the moral confidence, of the civilised world.

The third class of writings directly expressive of the spirit and life of the Revolution consists of oral addresses, either secular or sacred,—that is, of speeches, formal orations, and political sermons. “In America, as in the Grand Rebellion in England,” said a Loyalist writer—Boucher—of our Revolutionary time, “much execution was done by sermons.” Had it been otherwise, there would now be cause for wonder. Indeed, the preachers were then in full possession of that immense leadership, intellectual and moral, which had belonged to their order, in America ever since its settlement, in England ever since the middle of the sixteenth century; and though this tradition of leadership was beginning to suffer under the rivalry of the printing-press and under the ever-thickening blows of rationalism, yet, when aroused and concentrated upon any object, they still wielded an enormous influence over the opinions and actions of men,—even as to the business of this world. Without the aid “of the black regiment,” as he facetiously called them, James Otis declared his inability to carry his points. Late in the year 1774, the Loyalist, Daniel Leonard, in an essay accounting for the swift and alarming growth of the spirit of resistance and even of revolution in America, gave a prominent place to the part then played in the agitation by “our dissenting ministers.” “What effect must it have had upon the audience,” said he, “to hear the same sentiments and principles, which they had before read in a newspaper, delivered on Sundays from the sacred desk, with a religious awe, and the most solemn appeals to heaven, from lips which they had been taught from their cradles to believe could utter nothing but eternal truths!” The literary history of the pulpit of the American Revolution is virtually a history of the pulpit-champions of that movement; since those preachers who were not its champions could seldom find a printer bold enough to put their sermons to press, or even an opportunity to speak them from the pulpit. Nor was it necessary that ministers should seem to go out of their way in order to discourse upon those bitter secular themes: indeed, they would have been forced to go out of their way in order to avoid doing so. Fast days, thanksgiving days, election days, the anniversaries of battles and of important acts of Congress and of other momentous events in the progress of the struggle, brought such topics to the very doors of their studies, and even laid them upon the open Bibles in their pulpits. Moreover, if any clergyman held back from political preaching, he was not likely to escape some reminder, more or less gentle, as to what was expected of him in such a time of awful stress and peril. “Does Mr. Wibird preach against oppression and the other cardinal vices of the time?” wrote John Adams to his wife, from Philadelphia, shortly after the battle of Bunker Hill. “Tell him, the clergy here of every denomination, not excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten every Sabbath. They pray for Boston and the Massachusetts. They thank God most explicitly and fervently for our remarkable successes. They pray for the American army.”

More than in all other publications, it was in the fourth class of writings, namely, the political essays of the period, that the American people, on both sides of the great controversy, gave utterance to their real thoughts, their real purposes, their fears, their hopes, their hatreds, touching the bitter questions which then divided them. The political essay, whether in the shape of the newspaper article or in that of the pamphlet, gives us the most characteristic type of American literature for that portion of the eighteenth century.

Closely associated with the political essay as the most powerful form of prose in the literature of the American Revolution, should be mentioned the political satire, as being likewise the most powerful form of verse during the same period, and as constituting the fifth class of writings directly expressive of its thought and passion. The best examples of satire to be met with among us before the Revolutionary dispute had reached its culmination may be seen in the earlier and non-political verse of Freneau and John Trumbull. It is true that no great place was given to satire until about the year 1775—that is, until the debate had nearly passed beyond the stage of argument. From that time, however, and until very near the close of the Revolution, this form of literature rivalled, and at times almost set aside, the political essay as an instrument of impassioned political strife. On the Revolutionist side, the chief masters of political satire were Francis Hopkinson, John Trumbull, and Philip Freneau. On the side of the Loyalists, the satirical poet who in art and in power surpassed all his fellows, was Jonathan Odell.

For the sixth class of writings characteristic of the period, we may take the popular lyric poetry of the Revolution,—the numberless verses, commonly quite inelaborate and unadorned, that were written to be sung at the hearth-stone, by the camp-fire, on the march, on the battle-field, in all places of solemn worship.

Our seventh class gathers up the numerous literary memorials of the long struggle as a mere wit-combat, a vast miscellany of humorous productions in verse and prose. The newspapers of the Revolutionary period are strewn with such productions,—satirical poems, long and short, of nearly all degrees of merit and demerit, some of them gross and obscene, some of them simply clownish and stupid, some absolutely brutal in their partisan ferocity, some really clever—terse, polished, and edged with wit.

For the eighth class, partly in prose, chiefly in verse, are brought together the dramatic compositions of the period,—a class not inconsiderable in number, in variety, in vigour, and thoroughly representative both of the humour and of the tragic sentiment of the period. Tentative and crude as are nearly all of these writings, they are not unworthy of some slight attention, in the first place, as giving the genesis of a department of American literature now become considerable; but, chiefly, as reproducing the ideas, the passions, the motives, and the moods of that stormful time in our history, with a frankness, a liveliness, and an unshrinking realism not approached by any other species of Revolutionary literature.

Finally, to the ninth class belong those prose narratives that sprang out of the actual experiences of the Revolution, and that have embodied such experiences in the several forms of personal diaries, military journals, tales of adventure on land or sea, and especially records of suffering in the military prisons. Besides these, there are several elaborate contemporary histories of the Revolution.

Perhaps no aspect of the Revolutionary War has touched more powerfully the imagination and sympathy of the American people, than that relating to the sufferings borne by their own sailors and soldiers who chanced to fall as prisoners into the hands of the enemy; and for many years after the war, the bitterness which it brought into the hearts of men was kept alive and was hardened into a perdurable race-tradition through the tales which were told by the survivors of the British prison-pens and especially of the British prison-ships.

II. THE PRINCIPAL WRITERS

James Otis.—After his graduation at Harvard, at the age of eighteen, James Otis spent a year and a half at home in the study of literature and philosophy; then, devoting himself to the law, he had begun its practice at Plymouth in 1748; after two years of residence there, he had removed to Boston, and in spite of his youth, he had quickly risen to the highest rank in his profession. Throughout his whole career, he held to his early love of the Roman and Greek classics, particularly of Homer; while in English his literary taste was equally robust and wholesome. He was a powerful writer, and he wrote much; but in the structure and form of what he wrote, there are few traces of that enthusiasm for classical literature which we know him to have possessed. Perhaps his nature was too harsh, too passionate and ill-balanced, to yield to the culture even of a literary perfection which he could fully recognise and enjoy in others. He was, above all things, an orator; and his oratory was of the tempestuous kind—bold, vehement, irregular, overpowering.

In July, 1764, he published his gravest and most moderate pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Of all his political writing, this is the most sedate. It has even a tone of solemnity. Indeed, its moderation of tone, at the time, gave considerable offence to some of his own associates. The pamphlet was said to have satisfied nobody. Yet it gave food for thought to everybody; and it is the one work of Otis on which rests his reputation as a serious political thinker. The real object of Otis in this powerful pamphlet was not to bring about a revolution, but to avert one. But its actual effect was to furnish the starting-point for the entire movement of revolutionary reasoning, by which some two millions of people were to justify themselves in the years to come, as they advanced along their rugged and stormy path toward independence. It became for a time one of the legal text-books of the opponents of the ministry; it was a law-arsenal, from which other combatants, on that side, drew some of their best weapons. It expounded, with perfect clearness, even if with some shrinking, the constitutional philosophy of the whole subject; and it gave to the members of a conservative and a law-respecting race a conservative and a lawful pretext for resisting law, and for revolutionising the government.

John Adams.—Among the most striking of the literary responses to the news that, in disregard of all appeals from America, the Stamp Act had become a law, was one by a writer of extraordinary vigour in argument, of extraordinary affluence in invective, who chose to view the whole problem as having logical and historical relations far more extensive than had then been commonly supposed. This writer was John Adams, then but thirty years old, a rising member of the bar of Massachusetts, already known in that neighbourhood for his acuteness, fearlessness, and restless energy as a thinker and for a certain truculent and sarcastic splendour in his style of speech. To the very end of his long life, even his most offhand writings, such as diaries and domestic letters, reveal in him a trait of speculative activity and boldness. With the exception of Jefferson, he is the most readable of the statesmen of the Revolutionary period. A series of four essays by John Adams, which were first published, though without his name and without any descriptive title, in The Boston Gazette, in August, 1765, by their wide range of allusion, their novelty, audacity, eloquence, by the jocular savagery of their sarcasms on things sacred, easily and quickly produced a stir, and won for themselves considerable notoriety. In 1768, they were welded together into a single document, and as such were published in London under the somewhat misleading title of A Dissertation on the Canon and the Federal Law.

Francis Hopkinson.—On September 5, 1774, forty-four respectable gentlemen, representing twelve “colonies and provinces in North America,” made their way into Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, and there began “to consult upon the present state of the colonies.” Thus came into life the first Continental Congress, and with it the permanent political union of the American people. As they came out from that hall, some of them may have found, on stepping into Mr. John Dunlap’s shop not far away, a lively-looking little book—A Pretty Story—just come from the printer’s hands, in which book, under the veil of playful allegory, they could read in a few minutes a graphic and indeed a quite tremendous history of the very events that had brought them together in that place. Even a glance over this little book will show that here at last was a writer, enlisted in the colonial cause, who was able to defend that cause, and to assail its enemies, with a fine and a very rare weapon—that of humour. The personages included in A Pretty Story are few; its topics are simple and palpable, and even now in but little need of elucidation; the plot and incidents of the fiction travel in the actual footsteps of well-known history; while the aptness, the delicacy, and the humour of the allegory give to the reader the most delightful surprises, and are well sustained to the very end. Indeed, the wit of the author flashes light upon every legal question then at issue; and the stern and even technical debate between the colonies and the motherland is here translated into a piquant and a bewitching novelette. It soon became known that its author was Francis Hopkinson.

By this neat and telling bit of work, Hopkinson took his true place as one of the three leading satirists on the Whig side of the American Revolution,—the other two being John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. In the long and passionate controversy in which these three satirists bore so effective a part, each is distinguishable by his own peculiar note. The political satire of Freneau and of Trumbull is, in general, grim, bitter, vehement, unrelenting. Hopkinson’s satire is as keen as theirs, but its characteristic note is one of playfulness. They stood forth the wrathful critics and assailants of the enemy, confronting him with a hot and an honest hatred, and ready to overwhelm him with an acerbity that was fell and pitiless. Hopkinson, on the other hand, was too gentle, too tender-hearted—his personal tone was too full of amenity—for that sort of warfare. As a satirist, he accomplished his effects without bitterness or violence. No one saw more vividly than he what was weak, or despicable, or cruel, in the position and conduct of the enemy; but in exhibiting it, his method was that of good-humoured ridicule. Never losing his temper, almost never extreme in emotion or in expression, with an urbanity which kept unfailingly upon his side the sympathies of his readers, he knew how to dash and discomfit the foe with a raillery that was all the more effective because it seemed to spring from the very absurdity of the case, and to be, as Ben Jonson required, “without malice or heat.”

Francis Hopkinson was born in Philadelphia in 1737. Even in these days, he would have been regarded as a man of quite unusual cultivation, having in reality many solid as well as shining accomplishments. He was a distinguished practitioner of the law; he became an eminent judge; he was a statesman trained by much study and experience; he was a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humourist of unmistakable power. For us Americans, the name of Francis Hopkinson lives—if indeed it does live—chiefly on account of its presence in the august roll-call of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a devotee to the law, who never took farewell of the Muses. And thus it came about that, from the autumn of 1774 on until the very close of the long struggle, the cause of the Revolution, at nearly every stage and emergency of it, was rescued from depression, was quickened, was cheered forward, was given strength, by the vivacity of this delightful writer.

For the development among the Americans in 1776 of the robust political courage invoked by their new doctrine of national separation, it was necessary that the amiable note of provincialism—the filial obtuseness of the colonial mind—should be broken up, and that the Englishmen who lived in America should begin to find food for mirth and even for derision in the peculiarities of the Englishmen who lived in England. Toward this important political result, Hopkinson made some contribution in his so-called Letter written by a Foreigner on the Character of the English Nation. Under an old device for securing disinterested judgments on national peculiarities, Hopkinson here represents a cultivated foreigner as spending some time in England in the latter part of 1776, and as giving to a friend in his own country a cool but very satirical analysis of the alleged vices, foibles, and absurdities of the English people, and of the weak and wrong things in their treatment of their late colonists in America. From these character-sketches by the supposed foreigner in London in the year 1776—themselves by no means despicable for neat workmanship and for humorous power—it is not difficult to make out just how Hopkinson’s playful writings were adapted to the achievement of serious political results, as ridding colonial-minded Americans of the intellectual restraint imposed almost unconsciously by their old provincial awe of England, and helping them to subject the metropolitan race to caustic and even contemptuous handling, as a necessary condition of national free-mindedness and of bold dissent on questions of political authority and control.

The expedition of the year 1777, under the command of Sir William Howe, resulted in considerable temporary disaster to the American cause. Nevertheless, it was this very expedition, so full of prosperity for the British, which in its sequel gave to Hopkinson the occasion for his most successful stroke as a humorous writer. Sir William, having gained a brief succession of victories, finding Philadelphia an agreeable place of repose, concluded to settle himself down in that city. The surrounding inhabitants, who had at first regarded him and his army with no little terror, soon came to regard both with some derision, and to conceive the idea of practising upon both certain experiments which had in them an element of covert mirthfulness, as it were. By a very imaginative and a very rollicking expansion of the actual facts of this small affair, Hopkinson was enabled to compose his celebrated ballad, The Battle of the Kegs. The actual facts of the case are as follows, according to his own later testimony in prose: “Certain machines, in the form of kegs, charged with gunpowder, were sent down the river to annoy the British shipping at Philadelphia. The danger of these machines being discovered, the British manned the wharfs and shipping, and discharged their small arms and cannons at everything they saw floating in the river during the ebb tide.” This jingling little story of The Battle of the Kegs—mere doggerel though it is—flew from colony to colony, and gave the weary and anxious people the luxury of genuine and hearty laughter in very scorn of the enemy. To the cause of the Revolution, it was perhaps worth as much, just then, by way of emotional tonic and of military inspiration, as the winning of a considerable battle would have been. From a literary point of view, The Battle of the Kegs is very far from being the best of Hopkinson’s writings.

Nevertheless, for its matter and its manner and for the adaptation of both to the immediate enjoyment of the multitude of readers, it became in his own day the best known of all its author’s productions, even as, since then, it is the only one that has retained any general remembrance in our literature.

Philip Freneau.—The work of Philip Freneau as poet and satirist in direct contact with the American Revolution was broken into two periods,—these periods being separated from each other by an interval of about two years. The first period embraces those months of the year 1775 wherein his own fierce passions, like the passions of his countrymen, were set aflame by the outbreak of hostilities. Thereafter occurred a mysterious lapse in his activity as a writer on themes connected with the great struggle to which he had professed his undying devotion;—he was absent from the country until some time in the year 1778. With the middle of the year 1778 began the second period of his work as Revolutionary poet and satirist, and it did not come to an end, except with the end of the Revolution itself.

After a considerate inspection of the writers and the writings of our Revolutionary era, it is likely that most readers will be inclined to name Philip Freneau as the one American poet of all that time who, though fallen on evil days and driven from his true course somewhat by stormy weather, yet had a high and questionless vocation for poetry. Of his own claim to recognition he was proudly conscious. Nor was he unconscious of all that was malign to his poetic destiny, both in the time and in the place on which his lot was cast. Even in the larger relations which an American poet in the eighteenth century might hold to the development of English poetry everywhere, Freneau did some work, both early and late, so fresh, so original, so unhackneyed, so defiant of the traditions that then hampered and deadened English verse, so delightful in its fearless appropriation of common things for the divine service of poetry, as to entitle him to be called a pioneer of the new poetic age that was then breaking upon the world, and therefore to be classed with Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and their mighty comrades,—those poetic iconoclasts who, entering the temple of eighteenth-century English verse, broke up its wooden idols, rejected its conventionalised diction, and silenced for ever its pompous, monotonous, and insincere tune. Finally, of Freneau, it remains to be said that, in a certain eminent sense, he was the first American poet of Democracy; and that from the beginning to the end of his career, and in spite of every form of temptation, he remained true—fiercely, savagely true—to the conviction that his part and lot in the world was to be a protagonist on behalf of mere human nature, as against all its assailants whether in church or state. In the year 1795, this combat-loving poet sent forth a second and an enlarged edition of his poems, which had been first issued seven years before; and in some verses which he therein inserted, entitled “To my Book,” one may still hear the proud voice with which he claimed for himself that, whether in other ways successful or not, he was at least a poet militant—ever doing battle on the people’s side.

John Trumbull.—John Trumbull, with an inward vocation for a life of letters, turned away to a calling far more likely to supply him with bread—the profession of the law. It was in November, 1773, that he was admitted to the bar of Connecticut. Being then but twenty-three years of age, he wrote in verse an eternal farewell to verse-making. Notwithstanding all his vows of devotion to the new mistress whom he was to serve, Trumbull could not forget his earlier love. Henceforward, all his fine literary accomplishments, his subtlety, his wit, his gift for ridicule, his training in satire, are to be at the service of the popular cause, and are to produce in M’Fingal one of the world’s masterpieces in political badinage. The time of the poem is shortly after April, 1775. The scene is laid in a certain unnamed New England town, apparently not far from Boston. No literary production was ever a more genuine embodiment of the spirit and life of a people, in the midst of a stirring and world-famous conflict, than is M’Fingal an embodiment of the spirit and life of the American people, in the midst of that stupendous conflict which formed our great epoch of national deliverance. Here we find presented to us, with the vividness of a contemporary experience, the very issues which then divided friends and families and neighbourhood, as they did entire colonies, and at last the empire itself; the very persons and passions of the opposing parties; the very spirit and accent and method of political controversy at that time; and at last, those riotous frolics and that hilarious lawlessness with which the Revolutionary patriots were fond of demonstrating their disapproval of the politics of their antagonists.

Satire is, of course, one of the less noble forms of literary expression; and in satire uttering itself through burlesque, there is special danger of the presence of qualities which are positively ignoble. Yet never was satire employed in a better cause, or for loftier objects, or in a more disinterested spirit. The author of M’Fingal wrote his satire under no personal or petty motive. His poem was a terrific assault on men who, in his opinion, were the public enemies of his country; and he did not delay that assault until they were unable to strike back. M’Fingal belongs, indeed, to a type of literature hard, bitter, vengeful, often undignified; but the hardness of M’Fingal, its bitterness, its vengeful force are directed against persons believed by its author to be the foes—the fashionable and the powerful foes—of human liberty; if at times it surrenders its own dignity, it does so on behalf of the greater dignity of human nature. That M’Fingal is, in its own sphere, a masterpiece, that it has within itself a sort of power never attaching to a mere imitation, is shown by the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American people. Immediately upon its first publication, it perfectly seized and held the attention of the public. It was everywhere read. Probably as many as forty editions of it have been issued in this country and in England. It was one of the forces which drove forward that enormous movement of human thought and passion which we describe as the American Revolution; and in each of the great agitations of American thought and passion which have occurred since that time, occasioned by the French Revolution, by the War of 1812, and by the war which extinguished American slavery, this scorching satire against social reaction, this jeering burlesque on political obstructiveness, has been sent forth again and again into the world, to renew its mirthful and scornful activity in the ever-renewing battle for human progress.

John Dickinson.—Among all the political writings which were the immediate offspring of the baleful Stamp Act dispute, there stand out, as of the highest significance, certain essays which began to make their appearance in a Philadelphia newspaper in the latter part of the year 1767. These essays very soon became celebrated, on both sides of the Atlantic, under the short title of the Farmer’s Letters. Their full title was Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Though published without the author’s name, they were instantly recognised as the work of John Dickinson; and their appearance may perhaps fairly be described as constituting, upon the whole, the most brilliant event in the literary history of the Revolution. One distinction attaching to them is that they were written by a man who shared in the general excitement over the new attack upon colonial rights, but who desired to compose it rather than to increase it, and especially to persuade his countrymen so to bear their part in the new dispute as to save their rights as men, without losing their happiness as British subjects. Here was a man of powerful and cultivated intellect, with all his interests and all his tastes on the side of order, conservatism, and peace, if only with these could be had political safety and honour. No other serious political essays of the Revolutionary era quite equalled the Farmer’s Letters in literary merit, including in that term the merit of substance as well as of form; and, excepting the political essays of Thomas Paine, which did not begin to appear until nine years later, none equalled the Farmer’s Letters in immediate celebrity, and in direct power upon events. As they first came forth, from week to week, in the Philadelphia newspaper that originally published them, they were welcomed by the delighted interest and sympathy of multitudes of readers in that neighbourhood, and were instantly reproduced in all the twenty-five newspapers then published in America, with but four known exceptions. Within less than four weeks after the last letter had made its appearance, they were all collected and issued as a pamphlet, of which at least eight editions were published in different parts of America. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Farmer’s Letters gained universal attention among the people interested in the rising American dispute. The name of John Dickinson became a name of literary renown surpassing that of any other American, excepting Benjamin Franklin. On the continent of Europe, these essays of the Pennsylvania Farmer became, for a time, the fashion: they were talked of in the salons of Paris; the Farmer himself was likened to Cicero; and almost the highest distinction then possible for any man was bestowed upon him through the notice and applause of Voltaire. Even in England, the success of these writings was remarkable, and was shown quite as much in the censures as in the praises which were lavished upon them. Among the English admirers of the Farmer’s Letters was Edmund Burke, who gave his sanction to their principle. In America, the admiration and the gratitude of the people were expressed in almost every conceivable form. Thanks were voted to the Farmer by political associations, by town-meetings, by grand juries. The College of New Jersey conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. He became the favourite toast at public banquets. He was offered the membership of the choicest social clubs. On his entrance, one day, into a court-room, whither business called him, the proceedings were stopped in order to recognise his presence, and to make acknowledgment of the greatness and splendour of his services to the country. Songs were written in his praise.

The last of the Farmer’s Letters was published in February, 1768. In the following May, the new commissioners of customs arrived at Boston; in June, these commissioners, attempting to execute their odious office on John Hancock’s sloop, Liberty, were fiercely assaulted by the populace of Boston, and were driven for refuge to Castle William in Boston Harbour; whereupon Governor Bernard summoned thither General Gage with his troops from Halifax. Of these most ominous events in Boston, John Dickinson was an observer from his distant home on the Delaware; and even he, with all his deep loyalty and conscientious hesitation, was so stirred by them as then to utter what seems almost a ringing war-cry. Taking for his model Garrick’s Hearts of Oak—the air of which was then so familiar to every one—he wrote the stanzas which he christened A Song for American Freedom,—a bit of versification obviously the work of a man neither born nor bred to that business; yet being quickly caught up into universal favour under the endearing name of the Liberty Song, its manly lines soon resounded over all the land; and thenceforward, for several years, it remained the most popular political song among us.

If we attempt to estimate the practical effects of John Dickinson’s work as a political writer during the American Revolution, we shall find it not easy to disentangle and to separate them from the practical effects of his work as a politician. The two lines of power were closely interwoven; each, in the main, helped the other, as each was liable, in its turn, to be hindered by the other. At any rate, just as the politico-literary influence of James Otis was, upon the whole, predominant in America from 1764 until 1767, so, from the latter date until some months after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, was the politico-literary influence of John Dickinson predominant here. Moreover, as he succeeded to James Otis in the development of Revolutionary thought, so was he, at last, succeeded by Thomas Paine, who held sway among us, as the chief writer of political essays, from the early part of 1776 until the close of the Revolution itself. The prodigious decline in the influence of John Dickinson, at the approach of the issue of independence, is a thing not hard to explain; it was due in part to his personal characteristics, in part to the nature of his opinions. From the beginning of the troubles until some months after the first shedding of blood, in 1775, public opinion in America had set strongly in favour of making demand—even armed demand—for our political rights, but without any rupture of the colonial tie. It was, therefore, a period calling for clear and resolute statements of our claims, but with loyalty, urbanity, and tact. To be the chief literary exponent of such a period, John Dickinson was in every way fitted by talent, by temperament, by training. A man of wealth, cultivation, and elegant surroundings, practically versed in the law and in politics, considerate, cautious, disinclined to violent measures and to stormy scenes, actuated by a passion for the unity and the greatness of the English race and for peace among all men, it was his sincere desire that the dispute with the mother country should be so conducted as to end, at last, in the perfect establishment of American constitutional rights within the empire, but without any hurt or dishonour to England, and without any permanent failure in respect and kindness between her and ourselves. Nevertheless, in 1775, events occurred which gave a different aspect to the whole dispute, and swept an apparent majority of the American people quite beyond the sphere of such ideas and methods. John Dickinson’s concession to Parliament of a legislative authority over us, even to a limited extent, was roughly discarded; instead of which was enthroned among us the unhistoric and makeshift doctrine that American allegiance was due not at all to Parliament, but to the Crown only. Moreover, the moderation of tone, the urbane speech, the civility in conduct, exemplified by Dickinson in all this dispute with England, then became an anachronism and an offence. We were plunged at last into civil war—we had actually reached the stage of revolution; and the robust men who then ruled the scene were disposed, with no little contempt, to brush aside the moderate, conservative, and courteous Dickinson, who, either for advice or for conduct, seemed to them to have no further function to perform in the American world. His Farmer’s Letters were declared by Jefferson to have been “really an ‘ignis fatuus,’ misleading us from true principles.” Even Edward Rutledge, who, in June, 1776, agreed with Dickinson in his opposition to the plan for independence, nevertheless expressed some impatience with his intellectual fastidiousness and nicety,—declaring that the “vice of all his productions, to a considerable degree,” was “the vice of refining too much.”

Alexander Hamilton.—Within two or three weeks from the day on which the Congress announced its grand scheme for an agreement among the American colonists not to import or to consume the chief materials of the English carrying-trade, nor to export the chief products of their own farms, there came from the press of New York a pamphlet—Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress—ostensibly written by a farmer, and addressed to farmers, and from the level of their particular interests subjecting the proposal of Congress to a sort of criticism that was well fitted to arouse against it the bitterest and most unrelenting opposition of the great agricultural class. The writer of this pamphlet—Samuel Seabury, a Loyalist clergyman—professed to be a “Westchester Farmer,”—a signature which at once became the target for vast applause and for vast execration. The first pamphlet was dated November 16, 1774. Twelve days from that date came his second one—as keen, as fiery, as powerful as the first. In less than four weeks from the day of his second pamphlet, the undaunted farmer was ready with a third one. No sooner was this pamphlet off his hands, than the “Westchester Farmer” seems to have set to work upon his fourth pamphlet.

Among the throng of replies which burst forth from the press in opposition to the tremendous pamphlets of the “Westchester Farmer,” were two which immediately towered into chief prominence: A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, and The Farmer Refuted. The extraordinary ability of these two pamphlets—their fulness in constitutional learning, their acumen, their affluence in statement, their cleverness in controversial repartee, their apparent wealth in the fruits of an actual acquaintance with public business—led both the “Westchester Farmer” and the public in general to attribute them to some American writer of mature years and of ripe experience—to some member of the late Congress, for example—particularly to John Jay or to William Livingston. It is not easy to overstate the astonishment and the incredulity with which the public soon heard the rumour that these elaborate and shattering literary assaults on the argumentative position of the Loyalists were, in reality, the work of a writer who was then both a stripling in years and a stranger in the country—one Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian by birth, a Franco-Scotsman by parentage, an undergraduate of King’s College by occupation, a resident within the Thirteen Colonies but little more than two years, and at the time of the publication of his first pamphlet only seventeen years of age. In the exposition of his views touching the several vast fields of thought here brought under consideration,—constitutional law, municipal law, the long line of colonial charters, colonial laws and precedents, international polity as affecting the chief nations of Christendom, justice in the abstract and justice in the concrete, human rights both natural and conventional, the physical and metaphysical conditions underlying the great conflict then impending,—it must be confessed that this beardless philosopher, this statesman not yet out of school, this military strategist scarcely rid of his roundabout, exhibits a range and precision of knowledge, a ripeness of judgment, a serenity, a justice, a massiveness both of thought and of style, which would perhaps make incredible the theory of his authorship of these pamphlets, were not this theory confirmed by his undoubted exhibition in other ways, at about the same period of his life, of the same astonishing qualities.

Thomas Paine.—As the bitter events of 1775 rapidly unfolded themselves, not a few Americans became convinced that there was no true solution of the trouble except in that very independence which they had but a short time before dreaded and denounced. Of such Americans, Thomas Paine was one; and towards the end of the year, through incessant communication with the foremost minds in America, he had filled his own mind with the great decisive elements of the case, and was prepared to utter his thought thereon. Early in January, 1776, he did utter it, in the form of a pamphlet, published at Philadelphia, and entitled Common Sense,—the first open and unqualified argument in championship of the doctrine of American independence. During the first ten or twelve years of the Revolution, in just one sentiment all persons, Tories and Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree; namely, in abhorrence of the project of separation from the empire. Suddenly, however, and within a period of less than six months, the majority of the Whigs turned completely around, and openly declared for independence, which, before that time, they had so vehemently repudiated. Among the facts necessary to enable us to account for this almost unrivalled political somersault, is that of the appearance of Common Sense. This pamphlet was happily named: it undertook to apply common sense to a technical, complex, but most urgent and feverish, problem of constitutional law. In fact, on any other ground than that of common sense, the author of that pamphlet was incompetent to deal with the problem at all; since of law, of political science, and even of English and American history, he was ludicrously ignorant. But for the effective treatment of any question whatsoever that was capable of being dealt with under the light of the broad and rugged intellectual instincts of mankind,—man’s natural sense of truth, of congruity, of fair-play,—perhaps no other man in America, excepting Franklin, was a match for this ill-taught, heady, and slashing English stranger. From the tribunal of technical law, therefore, he carried the case to the tribunal of common sense; and in his plea before that tribunal, he never for a moment missed his point, or forgot his method. The one thing just then to be done was to convince the average American colonist of the period that it would be ridiculous for him any longer to remain an American colonist; that the time had come for him to be an American citizen; that nothing stood in the way of his being so, but the trash of a few pedants respecting the authority of certain bedizened animals called kings; and that, whether he would or no, the alternative was at last thrust into his face upon the point of a bayonet,—either to declare for national independence, and a wide-spaced and resplendent national destiny, or to accept, along with subserviency to England, the bitterness and the infamy of national annihilation. With all its crudities of thought, its superficiality, and its rashness of assertion, Common Sense is a masterly pamphlet; for in the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted to the hour, to the spot, and to the passions of men. Even its smattering of historical lore, and its cheap display of statistics, and its clumsy attempts at some sort of political philosophy, did not diminish the homage with which it was read by the mass of the community, who were even less learned and less philosophical than Paine, and who, at any rate, cared much more just then for their imperilled rights, than they did either for philosophy or for learning. The immediate practical effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader, who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. So far as the popular discussion of American independence is concerned, precisely this was the case, between January and July, 1776, with Thomas Paine and his pamphlet Common Sense. Within three months from the date of its first issue, at least 120,000 copies of it were sold in America alone. By that time, the pamphlet seemed to be in every one’s hand and the theme of every one’s talk.

Noble-minded and important as were the various services rendered by Paine to the American cause, on sea and land, in office and field, they could in no way be compared, as contributions to the success of the Revolution, with the work which he did during those same imperilled years merely as a writer, and especially as the writer of The Crisis. Between December, 1776, when the first pamphlet of that series was published, down to December, 1783, when the last one left the printer’s hands, this indomitable man produced no less than sixteen pamphlets under the same general title, adapting his message in each case to the supreme need of the hour, and accomplishing all this literary labour in a condition of actual poverty.

Thomas Jefferson.—On June 21, 1775, Thomas Jefferson took his seat for the first time as a member of the Continental Congress. He had then but recently passed his thirty-second birthday, and was known to be the author of two or three public papers of considerable note. Early in June, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, receiving the largest number of votes, was placed at the head of the committee of illustrious men to whom was assigned the task of preparing a suitable Declaration of Independence, and thereby he became the draftsman of the one American state paper that has reached to supreme distinction in the world, and that seems likely to last as long as American civilisation lasts. Whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance or since then,—a fact which seems to tell in favour of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger or in contempt, by friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has been censured for its form; for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its grandiose and vapouring style. Yet, probably no public paper ever more perfectly satisfied the immediate purposes for which it was sent forth. From one end of the country to the other, and as far as it could be spread among the people, it was greeted in public and in private with every demonstration of approval and delight. To a marvellous degree, it quickened the friends of the Revolution for their great task. Moreover, during the century and more since the close of the Revolution, the influence of this state paper on the political character and the political conduct of the American people has been great beyond all calculation.

No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account its extraordinary literary merits—its possession of the witchery of true substance wedded to perfect form:—its massiveness and incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse, musical, and electric; and, as an essential part of this literary outfit, many of those spiritual notes which can attract and enthrall our hearts,—veneration for God, veneration for man, veneration for principle, respect for public opinion, moral earnestness, moral courage, optimism, a stately and noble pathos, finally, self-sacrificing devotion to a cause so great as to be herein identified with the happiness, not of one people only, or of one race only, but of human nature itself. We may be altogether sure that no genuine development of literary taste among the American people in any period of our future history can result in serious misfortune to this particular specimen of American literature.

Samuel Adams.—Samuel Adams was a man of letters, but he was so only because he was above all things a man of affairs. Of literary art, in certain forms, he was no mean master; of literary art for art’s sake, he was entirely regardless. He was perhaps the most voluminous political writer of his time in America, and the most influential political writer of his time in New England; but everything that he wrote was meant for a definite practical purpose, and nothing that he wrote seemed to have had any interest for him aside from that purpose. Deep as is the obscurity which has fallen upon his literary services in the cause of the Revolution, the fame of those services was, at the time of them, almost unrivalled by that of any other writer, at least in the colonies east of the Hudson River. Born in Boston in 1722, graduated at Harvard in 1740, he early showed an invincible passion and aptitude for politics. One principal instrument by means of which Samuel Adams so greatly moulded public opinion, and shaped political and even military procedure, was the pen. Of modern politicians, he was among the first to recognise the power of public opinion in directing public events, and likewise the power of the newspaper in directing public opinion. It was, therefore, an essential part of his method as a politician to acquire and to exercise the art of literary statement in a form suited to that particular end. He had the instinct of a great journalist, and of a great journalist willing to screen his individuality behind his journal. In this service, it was not Samuel Adams that Samuel Adams cared to put and to keep before the public,—it was the ideas of Samuel Adams. Accordingly, of all American writers for the newspapers between the years 1754 and 1776, he was perhaps the most vigilant, the most industrious, the most effective, and also the least identified. Ever ready to efface himself in what he did, he realised that the innumerable productions of his pen would make their way to a far wider range of readers, and would be all the more influential, if they seemed to be the work, not of one writer, but of many. Therefore, he almost never published anything under his own name; but, under a multitude of titular disguises which no man has yet been able to number, this sleepless, crafty, protean politician, for nearly a third of a century, kept flooding the community with his ideas, chiefly in the form of essays in the newspapers,—thereby constantly baffling the enemies of the Revolutionary movement, and conducting his followers victoriously through those battles of argument which preceded and then for a time accompanied the battles of arms. In the long line of his state papers—the official utterances of the several public bodies with which he was connected and which so long trusted him as their most deft and unerring penman—one may now trace, almost without a break, the development of the ideas and the measures which formed the Revolution. If we take into account the strain of thought and of emotional energy involved in all these years of fierce political controversy and of most perilous political leadership, we shall hardly fear to overestimate the resources of Samuel Adams in his true career of agitator and iconoclast;—especially the elasticity, the toughness, the persistence of a nature which could, in addition to all this, undertake and carry through, during the same long period, all the work he did in literary polemics,—work which alone might seem enough to employ and tire the strength even of a strong man who had nothing else to do.

The traits of Samuel Adams the writer are easily defined—for they are likewise the traits of Samuel Adams the politician, and of Samuel Adams the man. His fundamental rule for literary warfare was this—“Keep your enemy in the wrong.” His style, then, was the expression of his intellectual wariness,—a wariness like that of the scout or the bushwhacker, who knows that behind any tree may lurk his deadly foe, that a false step may be his ruin, that a badly-aimed shot may make it impossible for him ever to shoot again. Whether in oral or in written speech his characteristics were the same,—simplicity, acuteness, logical power, and strict adaptation of means to the practical end in view. Nothing was for effect—everything was for effectiveness. He wrote pure English, and in a style severe, felicitous, pointed, epigrammatic. Careful as to facts, disdainful of rhetorical excesses, especially conscious of the strategic folly involved in mere overstatement, an adept at implication and at the insinuating light stroke, he had never anything to take back or to apologise for. In the wearisome fondness of his country for Greek and Roman analogies, he shared to the full; and, in a less degree, in its passion for the tags and gewgaws of classical quotation. Of course, his style bears the noble impress of his ceaseless and reverent reading of the English Bible. To a mere poet, he seldom alludes. Among secular writers of modern times, his days and nights were given, as occasion served, to Hooker, Coke, Grotius, Locke, Sidney, Vattel, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Hume.

John Witherspoon.—Although John Witherspoon did not come to America until the year 1768,—after he had himself passed the middle line of human life,—yet so quickly did he then enter into the spirit of American society, so perfectly did he identify himself with its nobler moods of discontent and aspiration, so powerfully did he contribute by speech and act to the right development of this new nation out of the old cluster of dispersed and dependent communities, that it would be altogether futile to attempt to frame a just account of the great intellectual movements of our Revolution without some note of the part played in it by this eloquent, wise, and efficient Scotsman—at once teacher, preacher, politician, law-maker, and philosopher, upon the whole not undeserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon him as “one of the great men of the age and of the world.” Born in 1722, at the age of forty-six he accepted an invitation to the presidency of the College of New Jersey. At the time of his removal to America, he had achieved distinction as a preacher and an ecclesiastical leader. Even as an author, also, he had become well known. His advent to the college over which he was to preside was like that of a prince coming to his throne. The powerful influence which, through his published writings, Witherspoon exerted upon the course of Revolutionary thought, may be traced in the very few sermons of his which touch upon the political problems of that time, in various Congressional papers, and especially in the numerous essays, long or short, serious or mirthful, which he gave to the press between the years 1775 and 1783, and commonly without his name. As a writer of political and miscellaneous essays, it is probable that Witherspoon’s activity was far greater than can now be ascertained; but his hand can be traced with certainty in a large group of keen and sprightly productions of that sort. Of all these writings, the chief note is that of a virile mind, well-balanced, well-trained, and holding itself steadily to its own independent conclusions,—in short, of enlightened and imperturbable common sense, speaking out in a form always temperate and lucid, often terse and epigrammatic.

John Woolman.—It is no slight distinction attaching to American literature for the period of the Revolution, that in a time so often characterised as barren of important literary achievement, were produced two of the most perfect examples of autobiography to be met with in any literature. One of these, of course, is Franklin’s Autobiography, the first, the largest, and the best part of which was written in 1771,—a work that has long since taken its place among the most celebrated and most widely read of modern books. Almost at the very time at which that fascinating story was begun, the other great example of autobiography in our Revolutionary literature was finished—The Journal of John Woolman, a book which William Ellery Channing long afterward described as “beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language.” It is a notable fact, however, that while these two masterpieces in the same form of literature are products of the same period, they are, in respect of personal quality, very nearly antipodal to each other; for, as Franklin’s account of himself delineates a career of shrewd and somewhat selfish geniality, of unperturbed carnal content, of kindly systematic and most successful worldliness, so the autobiography of Woolman sets forth a career which turns out to be one of utter unworldliness, of entire self-effacement, all in obedience to an Unseen Leadership, and in meek and most tender devotion to the happiness of others—especially slaves, poor toiling white people, and speechless creatures unable to defend themselves against the inhumanity of man.

John Woolman, who was of a spirit so unpresuming that he would have wondered and have been troubled to be told that any writing of his was ever to be dealt with as literature, was born in 1720 in Northampton, New Jersey, his father being a farmer, and of the Society of Friends. Until his twenty-first year, he lived at home with his parents, and, as he expressed it, “wrought on the plantation.” Having reached his majority, he took employment in the neighbouring village of Mount Holly, in a shop for general merchandise. In this occupation he passed several years; after which he began to give himself almost wholly to the true work of his life—that of an apostle, with a need to go from land to land in fulfilment of his apostleship, and able, like one of the greatest of all apostles, to minister to his own necessities by the labours of a lowly trade. For, long before he set out upon these travels, even from his early childhood, he had entered, as he thought, into the possession of certain treasures of the spirit which he could not hoard up for himself alone,—which, if he could but share them with others, would make others rich and happy beyond desire or even imagination.

The autobiography of John Woolman was the gradual and secret growth of many years, beginning when he was of the age of thirty-six, and added to from time to time until, at the age of fifty-two, being in the city of York, in England, about the business of his Master, he was stricken down of the smallpox, whereof he died. Besides this story of his life, he left several ethical and religious essays. All these writings are, as Whittier has said, in the style “of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language.” “The secret of Woolman’s purity of style,” said Channing, “is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated the words.” There is about John Woolman’s writings that unconventionality of thought, that charity without pretence, that saintliness without sanctimony or sourness, that delicacy, that untaught beauty of phrase, by which we are helped to understand the ardour of Charles Lamb’s love for him, as uttered in his impulsive exhortation to the readers of the Essays of Elia: “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart.” “A perfect gem!” wrote Henry Crabb Robinson, in 1824, of Woolman’s Journal, which Lamb had shortly before made known to him. “His is a ‘schöne Seele.’ An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite purity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.” Perhaps, after all, the aroma that lingers about Woolman’s words is best described by Woolman’s true spiritual successor in American literature—Whittier—in the saying, that he who reads these writings becomes sensible “of a sweetness as of violets.”

Benjamin Franklin.—For the period of the Revolution the writings of Franklin fall naturally into two principal divisions—first, those connected with the Revolutionary controversy, and, secondly, those almost entirely apart from it. Among the latter, of course, are to be reckoned his numerous papers on scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions; a considerable number of his personal letters—these being, perhaps, the wisest and wittiest of all his writings; many short sketches, usually playful in tone, often in the form of apologues or parables; finally, the first, and the best, part of his Autobiography, which, during the hundred years succeeding its first publication in 1791, has probably been the most widely read book of its class in any language. Here, then, as a product of Franklin’s general literary activity during the Revolutionary period, is a considerable body of literature not concerned in the strifes of that bitter time, almost faultless in form, and so pervaded by sense, gaiety, and kindness, as to be among the most precious and most delightful of the intellectual treasures of mankind.

In Franklin’s literary contributions to the Revolutionary controversy between 1763 and 1783, we find that his relation to that controversy had two strongly contrasted phases: first, his sincere and most strenuous desire that the dispute should not pass from the stage of words to that of blows, and thence to a struggle for American secession from the empire; and, secondly, after the stage of blows had been reached, his championship of American secession through war as the only safe or honourable course then left to his countrymen. The line of division between these two phases of opinion and action falls across the spring and early summer of 1775. Prior to that time, all his writings, serious or jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of convincing the English people that the American policy of their government was an injustice and a blunder, and of convincing the American people that their demand for political rights would certainly be satisfied, if persisted in steadily and without fear, but also without disloyalty and without unseemly violence. Subsequent to that time, having accepted with real sorrow the alternative of war and of war for American secession, all his writings, serious and jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of making that war a successful one,—a result to which, as a writer, he could best contribute by such appeals to public opinion in America as should nourish and quicken American confidence in their own cause, and by such appeals to public opinion in Europe as should win for that cause its moral and even its physical support. For reasons that must be obvious, his general literary activity was far greater during the first phase of this controversy than during the second.

Probably no writer ever understood better than he how to make dull subjects lively, and how, by consequence, to attract readers to the consideration of matters in themselves unattractive. As he well knew, the European public, whether upon the Continent or in Great Britain, were not likely to give their days and nights to the perusal of long and solemn dissertations on the rights and wrongs of his countrymen in the other hemisphere. Accordingly, such dissertations he never gave them, but, upon occasion, brief and pithy and apparently casual statements of the American case; exposing, also, the weak points of the case against his own, by means of anecdotes, epigrams, jeux-d’esprit; especially contriving to throw the whole argument into some sort of dramatic form.

Franklin’s favourite weapon in political controversy—a weapon which, perhaps, no other writer in English since Dean Swift has handled with so much cleverness and effect—was that of satire in the form of ludicrous analogue, thereby burlesquing the acts and pretensions of his adversary, and simply overwhelming him with ridicule. Moreover, with Franklin, as had been the case with Dean Swift before him, this species of satire took a form at once so realistic and so comically apt, as to result in several examples of brilliant literary hoaxing—a result which, in the controversy then going on, was likely to be beneficial to the solemn and self-satisfied British Philistine of the period, since it compelled him for once to do a little thinking, and also to stand off and view his own portrait as it then appeared to other people, and even in spite of himself to laugh at his own portentous and costly stupidity in the management of an empire that seemed already grown too big for him to take proper care of. As Franklin was by far the greatest man of letters on the American side of the Revolutionary controversy, so a most luminous and delightful history of the development of thought and emotion during the Revolution might be composed, by merely bringing together detached sayings of Franklin, humorous and serious, just as these fell from his tongue or pen in the successive stages of that long conflict: it would be a trail of light across a sea of storm and gloom. Nevertheless, not by illustrative fragments of what he wrote or said, any more than by modern descriptions, however vivid, can an adequate idea be conveyed of the mass, the force, the variety, the ease, the charm, of his total work as a writer during those twenty tremendous years. Undoubtedly, his vast experience in affairs and the sobriety produced by mere official responsibility had the effect of clarifying and solidifying his thought, and of giving to the lightest products of his genius a sanity and a sureness of movement which, had he been a man of letters only, they could hardly have had in so high a degree. It is only by a continuous reading of the entire body of Franklin’s Revolutionary writings, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that any one can know how brilliant was his wisdom, or how wise was his brilliancy, or how humane and gentle and helpful were both. No one who, by such a reading, procures for himself such a pleasure and such a benefit, will be likely to miss the point of Sydney Smith’s playful menace to his daughter,—“I will disinherit you, if you do not admire everything written by Franklin.”

Thomas Hutchinson.—Within the two decades of the American Revolution are to be found two distinct expressions of the historic spirit among this people. In the first place, from a consciousness of the meaning and worth of the unique social experiments then already made by each of the thirteen little republics, came the impulse which led to the writing of their local history. Afterward, from a similar consciousness of the meaning and worth of the immense events which began to unfold themselves in the collective political and military experience of these thirteen little republics, then rapidly melting together into a larger national life under the fires of a common danger, came the impulse which led to the writing of their general history.

Reaching the line which divides colonial themes from those of the Revolution, we confront a writer who, in his capacity as historian, not only towers above all his contemporaries, but deals with themes which are both colonial and Revolutionary. This writer is the man so famous and so hated in his day as a Loyalist statesman and magistrate, Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian who served as governor of Massachusetts under appointment by the king. That he deserves to be ranked as, upon the whole, the ablest historical writer produced in America prior to the nineteenth century, there is now substantial agreement among scholars. In writing the early history of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson was in effect writing the history of his own ancestors, some of whom had been eminent, some of whom had been notorious, in the colony almost from the year of its foundation. He was born in Boston in 1711. From the age of twenty-six when he was elected to his first office, until the age of sixty-three when he resigned his last one, he was kept constantly and conspicuously in the public service. Before the outbreak of the great controversy between the colonies and the British government, no other man in America had, to so high a degree as Hutchinson, the confidence both of the British government on the one hand, and of his own countrymen on the other. Had his advice been taken in that controversy by either of the two parties who had so greatly confided in him, the war of the Revolution would have been averted. While the writing of history was for Hutchinson but the recreation and by-play of a life immersed in outward business, the study of history seems to have been a passion with him almost from his childhood. It should be added that Hutchinson had the scientific idea of the importance of primary documents. Through his great eminence in the community, and through his ceaseless zeal in the collection of such documents, he was enabled in the course of many years to bring together a multitude of manuscript materials of priceless value touching the history of New England. With such materials at his command, and using with diligence those fragments of time which his unflagging energy enabled him to pluck from business and from sleep, he was ready, in July, 1764, amid the first mutterings of that political storm which was to play havoc with these peaceful studies and to shatter the hopes of his lifetime, to send to the printer, in Boston, the first volume of The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. He published his second volume in the early summer of the year 1767,—not far from the very day on which Parliament, by the passage of the Townshend Act, perpetrated the ineffable folly of plunging the empire into such tumults as led to its disruption. Notwithstanding the lurid and bitter incidents amid which it was written, the second volume of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts, like the first one, has the tone of moderation and of equanimity suggestive of a philosopher abstracted from outward cares, and devoted to the disinterested discovery and exposition of the truth.

From the time of the publication of the second instalment of his work, sixty-one years were to elapse before the public should receive ocular evidence that the author had had the fortitude, amid the calamities which overwhelmed his later years, to go on with his historical labours, and to complete a third and final volume, telling the story of Massachusetts from the year 1750 until the year 1774—the year in which he laid down his office as governor and departed for England. Borne down with sorrow, amazed and horror-stricken at the fury of the storm that was overturning his most prudent calculations, and was sweeping him and his party from all their moorings out into an unknown sea, he found some solace in resuming in England the historical task which he had left unfinished. In his diary for October 22, 1778, its completion is recorded in this modest note: “I finished the revisal of my History, to the end of my Administration, and laid it by.” Laid by certainly it was, and not until the year 1828 was it permitted to come forth to the light of day, and then, largely, through the magnanimous intervention of a group of noble-minded American scholars in the very city which, in his later lifetime, would not have permitted his return to it.

A great historian Hutchinson certainly was not, and, under the most favourable outward conditions, could not have been. He had the fundamental virtues of a great historian—love of truth, love of justice, diligence, the ability to master details and to narrate them with accuracy. Even in the exercise of these fundamental virtues, however, no historian in Hutchinson’s circumstances could fail to be hampered by the enormous preoccupation of official business, or to have his judgment warped and coloured by the prepossessions of his own political career. While Hutchinson was, indeed, a miracle of industry, it was only a small part of his industry that he was free to devote to historical research. However sincere may have been his purpose to tell the truth and to be fair to all, the literary product of such research was inevitably weakened, as can now be abundantly shown, by many serious oversights and by many glaring misrepresentations, apparently through his failure to make a thorough use of important sources of information then accessible to him, such as colonial pamphlets, colonial newspapers, the manuscripts of his own ancestors and of the Mathers, and especially the General Court records of the province in which he played so great a part. As to the rarer intellectual and spiritual endowments of a great historian,—breadth of vision, breadth of sympathy, the historic imagination, and the power of style,—these Hutchinson almost entirely lacked. That he had not the gift of historical divination, the vision and the faculty divine to see the inward meaning of men and events, and to express that meaning in gracious, noble, and fascinating speech—Hutchinson was himself partly conscious.

His first volume seems to have been written under a consciousness that his subject was provincial, and even of a local interest altogether circumscribed. In the second volume, one perceives a more cheery and confident tone, due, probably, to the prompt recognition which his labours had then received not only in Massachusetts but in England. In the third volume are to be observed signs of increasing ease in composition, a more flowing and copious style, not a few felicities of expression. That, in all these volumes, he intended to tell the truth, and to practise fairness, is also plain; to say that he did not entirely succeed, is to say that he was human. Of course, the supreme test of historical fairness was reached when he came to the writing of his third volume,—which was, in fact, the history not only of his contemporaries but of himself, and of himself in deep and angry disagreement with many of them. It is much to his praise to say that, throughout this third volume, the prevailing tone is calm, moderate, just, with only occasional efforts at pleading his own cause, with only occasional flickers of personal or political enmity. But no one should approach the reading of Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay with the expectation of finding in it either brilliant writing or an entertaining story. From beginning to end, there are few passages that can be called even salient—but almost everywhere an even flow of statesmanlike narrative; severe in form; rather dull, probably, to all who have not the preparation of a previous interest in the matters discussed; but always pertinent, vigorous, and full of pith. Notwithstanding Hutchinson’s modest opinion of his own ability in the drawing of historical portraits, it is probable that in such portraits of distinguished characters, both among his contemporaries and among his predecessors, the general reader will be likely to find himself the most interested.

Samuel Peters.—Somewhere in the debatable land between history, fiction, and burlesque, there wanders a notorious book, first published anonymously in London in 1781, and entitled A General History of Connecticut. Though the authorship of this book was never acknowledged by the man who wrote it, there is no doubt that it was the work of Samuel Peters, an Anglican clergyman and a Loyalist, a man of commanding personal presence, uncommon intellectual resources, powerful will, and ill-balanced character. He opposed with frank and bitter aggressiveness the Revolutionary politics then rampant. He sailed for England in October, 1774. There he abode until his return to America in 1805. During the five or six years immediately following his arrival in England, he seems to have had congenial employment in composing his General History of Connecticut, as a means apparently of wreaking an undying vengeance upon the sober little commonwealth in which he was born and from which he had been ignominiously cast out. The result of this long labour of hate was a production, calling itself historical, which was characterised by a contemporary English journal—The Monthly Review—as having “so many marks of party spleen and idle credulity” as to be “altogether unworthy of the public attention.” In spite, however, of such censure both then and since then, this alleged History has had, now for more than a hundred years, not only a vast amount of public attention, but very considerable success in a form that seems to have been dear to its author’s heart—that of spreading through the English-speaking world a multitude of ludicrous impressions to the dishonour of the people of whom it treats. It cannot be denied that for such a service it was most admirably framed; since its grotesque fabrications in disparagement of a community of Puritan dissenters seem to have proved a convenient quarry for ready-made calumnies upon that sort of people there and elsewhere.

Jonathan Carver.—In the year 1763, at the close of that famous war which resulted in the acquisition of Canada by the English, there was in New England an enterprising young American soldier, named Jonathan Carver, stranded as it were amid the threatened inanities of peace and civilisation, and confronting a prospect that was for him altogether insipid through its lack of adventure, and especially of barbaric restlessness and discomfort. “I began to consider,” so he wrote a few years afterward, “having rendered my country some services during the war, how I might continue still serviceable, and contribute, as much as lay in my power, to make that vast acquisition of territory gained by Great Britain in North America, advantageous to it. To this purpose, I determined to explore the most unknown parts of them.” The project thus clearly wrought out in 1763 by this obscure provincial captain in New England anticipated by forty years the American statesmanship which, under President Jefferson, sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to penetrate the passes of the Rocky Mountains and to pitch their tents by the mouth of the Columbia River; even as it anticipated by a hundred years the Canadian statesmanship which, under Sir John Macdonald, has in our time beaten out an iron way across the continent at its greatest breadth.

It seems to have taken Carver about three years to complete his preparations for the tremendous enterprise which then inspired him. Not until June, 1766,—in the political lull occasioned by the repeal of the Stamp Act—was he able to start. After passing Albany, he plunged at once into the wilderness which then stretched its rough dominion over the uncomputed spaces to the western sea. In June, 1768, he began his journey homeward. In the October following, he reached Boston, “having,” as he says, “been absent from it on this expedition two years and five months, and during that time travelled near seven thousand miles. From thence, as soon as I had properly digested my journal and charts, I set out for England, to communicate the discoveries I had made, and to render them beneficial to the kingdom.” In 1778, nine years after his arrival there, he succeeded in bringing out his noble and fascinating book of Travels through the Interior Parts of North America. It was in consequence of the publication, soon after his death, in the year 1780, of the tale of Carver’s career as an explorer in America, and especially of the struggles and the miseries he encountered as an American man of letters in London, that, for the relief in future of deserving men of letters there, the foundation was laid for that munificent endowment, now so celebrated under the name of “The Royal Literary Fund.” His best monument is his book. As a contribution to the history of inland discovery upon this continent, and especially to our materials for true and precise information concerning the “manners, customs, religion, and language of the Indians,” Carver’s book of Travels is of unsurpassed value. Besides its worth for instruction, is its worth for delight; we have no other “Indian book” more captivating than this. Here is the charm of a sincere, powerful, and gentle personality—the charm of novel and significant facts, of noble ideas, of humane sentiments, all uttered in English well-ordered and pure. In evidence, also, of the European celebrity acquired by his book, may be cited the fact that it seems to have had a strong fascination for Schiller, as, indeed, might have been expected; and Carver’s report of a harangue by a Nadowessian chief over the dead body of one of their great warriors—being itself a piece of true poetry in prose—was turned into verse by the German poet, and became famous as his Nadowessiers Totenlied,—a dirge which pleased Goethe so much that he declared it to be among the best of Schiller’s poems in that vein, and wished that his friend had written a dozen such.[2]

St. John Crèvecœur.—In 1782, there was published in London an American book written with a sweetness of tone and, likewise, with a literary grace and a power of fascination then quite unexpected from the western side of the Atlantic. It presented itself to the public behind this ample title-page:—“Letters from an American Farmer, describing certain provincial situations, manners, and customs, not generally known, and conveying some idea of the late and present interior circumstances of the British Colonies in North America: written for the information of a friend in England, by J. Hector St. John, a farmer in Pennsylvania.” The name of the author as thus given upon his title-page, was not his name in full, but only the baptismal portion of it. By omitting from the book his surname, which was Crèvecœur, he had chosen to disguise to the English public the fact—which could hardly have added to his welcome among them—that though he was an American, he was not an English American, but a French one,—having been born in Normandy, and of a noble family there, in 1731. While really an American farmer, Crèvecœur was a man of education, of refinement, of varied experience in the world. When but a lad of sixteen, he had removed from France to England; when but twenty-three, he had emigrated to America.

As an account of the American colonies, this book makes no pretension either to system or to completeness; and yet it does attain to a sort of breadth of treatment by seizing upon certain representative traits of the three great groups of colonies,—the northern, the middle, and the southern. There are in this book two distinct notes—one of great peace, another of great pain. The earlier and larger portion of the book gives forth this note of peace: it is a prose pastoral of life in the New World, as that life must have revealed itself to a well-appointed American farmer of poetic and optimistic temper, in the final stage of our colonial era, and just before the influx of the riot and bitterness of the great disruption. This note of peace holds undisturbed through the first half of the book, and more. Not until, in the latter half of it, the author comes to describe slavery in the Far South, likewise the harsh relations between the colonists and the Indians, finally the outbreak of the tempest of civil war, does his book give out its second note—the note of pain. By its inclusion of these sombre and agonising aspects of life in America, the book gains, as is most obvious, both in authenticity and literary strength. It is not hard to understand why, at such a time, a book like this should soon have made its way into the languages of Europe, particularly those of France, Germany, and Holland; nor why it should have fascinated multitudes of readers in all parts of the Continent, even beguiling many of them—too many of them, perhaps—to try their fortunes in that blithe and hospitable portion of the planet where the struggle for existence seemed almost a thing unknown. In England, likewise, the book won for itself, as was natural, a wide and a gracious consideration; its praises lasted among English men of letters as long, at least, as until the time of Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; while its idealised treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects upon the imagination of Campbell, Byron, Southey, and Coleridge, and furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes of literary colonisation in America as that of “Pantisocracy.”

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. THE HISTORIANS

Early Dearth of Good Writers.—Among the consciously useful forms of literature there is none in which, by common consent, American men of letters have so uniformly distinguished themselves as in history. Bradford and Winthrop in the seventeenth century are as conspicuous among their countrymen and as respectable before the world as Prescott and Parkman in the nineteenth. Prince and Stith are as minutely conscientious—and almost as dull—as the most scientific of modern students; and Hutchinson, when judged by the prevailing standards of his own times, will be found not less diligent or judicious than Adams and Rhodes are thought to-day. Indeed, there is in our literature but one period destitute of historians of merit, and that period falls in the years immediately after the Revolution, precisely in the years when we should most expect historical writing to flourish; for those last years of the eighteenth century seem, as we look back upon them, to be full of encouragement for national pride. In 1781, Lord Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown. In 1783, King George acknowledged the independence of his rebellious subjects in America. Under a constitution since renowned, they soon instituted for themselves a federal government upon a continental scale. The prediction of Jefferson’s Declaration seemed to be justified. The United States were ready “to assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.”

Popular revolutions such as this have often been followed by a period of great literary fruitfulness, particularly in history. So it proved in Holland, in France, in Italy. But in America nothing of the sort occurred. The twenty-five years after Yorktown, barren in literature of every kind, are exceptionally devoid of historical writers who deal with large subjects in a large way. There were, of course, narratives of the war by participants and panegyrists. Such were David Ramsay’s “History of the American Revolution” (1789), Mrs. Mercy Warren’s “Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution” (1805), and the “History of the American Revolution” which appeared in 1819 under the name of Paul Allen. But none of these works shows largeness of view, and none is distinguished by literary qualities. They serve a good purpose, however, in reflecting the feeling of the Revolution. This is particularly true of Mrs. Warren’s book. She was a sister of James Otis, whose argument against the writs of assistance in 1761 marks the beginning of the Revolutionary agitation, and the wife of General Joseph Warren, who fell on Bunker Hill; and her intimacy with these and other New England patriots lends a certain representative value to her forgotten discursiveness. A similar value attaches also to the more readable, but not less bitter “Life of James Otis, containing Notices of Contemporary Characters and Events,” written by William Tudor; likewise, though in a less degree, to several other early biographies of Revolutionary worthies, among which the most weighty is the “Life of George Washington,” in five volumes (1804–1807), based upon his original papers and compiled by his fellow-Virginian John Marshall, afterwards famous as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. For students of American history, this is a useful book, such as a man of Marshall’s ability could not fail to produce when dealing with subjects with which he was thoroughly familiar and in which he was deeply interested. But it is hastily written, far too long, and, save for its partisanship, altogether colourless. Nevertheless, it occupies a relatively high rank among its coevals, for, taken all in all, American writers on national history in the years 1780–1820 are few and weak.

Causes of this Inferiority.—In explanation of this circumstance various conjectures have been advanced. Indubitably, the proscription of the Loyalists after the war deprived the thirteen States of wealth and intelligence which might otherwise have afforded to American literature an American support. But the effect upon letters of that social loss is easily exaggerated. The promptness with which serious English books were reprinted in America, even in the years when, as Goodrich discovered, it was “positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to undertake American works,” proves sufficiently that a reading public still remained. Another reason why, in the earlier years of our national life, there were few historians, may be found in the exaggerated value which most Americans then set upon certain abstract and therefore absolute theories in politics. Among the leaders of the Anti-Federalist or Democratic party, especially, a sort of political orthodoxy grew up. Theirs became a party with a creed, but without a programme. In the Southern States, they developed, in defence of their principles, an extensive literature of political and economic theory, far surpassing in variety of argument, subtlety of reasoning, and clearness of exposition anything that the North could show. But throughout it all, they appealed for support to the unchanging text of written constitutions, or to the immemorial prescriptions of natural law; upon history they looked as a tedious tale of ignorance and error. The Federalists, on the other hand, like the Whigs and the Republicans who succeeded them, were a party rather of measures than of principles. For their practical aims, a knowledge of human experience was serviceable. They inclined, therefore, to historical studies, and it is in New England, where their hold had been strongest, that the most significant of American historians at length appear. But even the stoutest Federalist among the contemporaries of Jefferson could discern in the recent experience of the nation at large little to stimulate patriotic ardour. In the estimation of men as yet unaccustomed to “think continentally,” the new government had brought few blessings: its burdens seemed innumerable. Taxes were high. Money was bad, and scarce as well. The Revolution had loosened the bonds of traditional authority, and internal disorder was rife. The mutual obligations assumed by England and by the United States at the Peace of 1783 were disregarded on both sides; and a new treaty, whose stipulations the vast majority of Americans deemed humiliating to themselves and dishonourable towards their French allies, served chiefly to prolong internal dissensions by introducing as an unwelcome issue in American politics the conflicting sympathies of the Federalists with England and of the Democrats with France. What wonder, then, that those who concerned themselves with the history of America at all turned from the Union to their several States, each of which, in their view, had been made separately sovereign by the events of the Revolution. Their temper is well expressed by the title of David Ramsay’s “History of the Revolution of South Carolina from a British Province to an Independent State” (1785). Ramsay’s “South Carolina” was soon followed by Belknap’s “New Hampshire” (1784–92), Proud’s “Pennsylvania” (1797), Minot’s “Continuation of the History [Hutchinson’s] of Massachusetts” (1798), Burke’s “Virginia” (1804), Williamson’s “North Carolina” (1812), and Trumbull’s “Connecticut” (1818). Among these books, Belknap’s justly holds the highest rank. Its style is vigorous and flexible, and in the opinion of de Tocqueville, “the reader of Belknap will find more general ideas and more strength of thought than are to be met with in other American historians” of the same period.

Washington Irving.—The life of Washington Irving as a man of letters is followed elsewhere in this volume; but no account of American historical writers, however slight, can omit his name. In the more laborious paths of the historian’s vocation he seldom walked. Research was foreign to his temperament, and in his histories references to authorities are few. He makes no pretence of disclosing new facts, or even of suggesting new theories concerning facts already known. But “the picturesque distances of earth’s space and the romantic remoteness of history” kindled his imagination, and his travels, which were extended for an American of his day, produced enduring results in a series of books dealing with the countries, and in part with the history of the countries, which he visited. One reason for his assuming the duties, not over-serious, of an attaché of the American legation in Madrid was Minister Everett’s suggestion that he make an English version of the matter relating to America in Navarrete’s work on the voyages and discoveries of the Spanish at the end of the fifteenth century, which had then been recently published. This project presently expanded into Irving’s “Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, to which are added Those of his Companions” (1828). It was followed in the next year by “The Conquest of Granada,” and in 1832 by “Tales of the Alhambra.” Returning to America, Irving travelled extensively west of the Mississippi, and presently published his “Astoria” (1836) and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville” (1837). Of these books, which, with an unimportant “Life of Mahomet and his Successors” (1849) and a five-volume “Life of Washington” (1855–59), constitute Irving’s historical writings, the “Columbus” is justly the most esteemed. It gained for its author the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature and the Oxford degree of D.C.L. And not without reason, for it embodies, in a skilful narrative, not merely the substance of Navarrete’s documents, which Irving rendered with fidelity into excellent English, but also the results of other studies which were, for him, exceptionally thorough. Modern criticism has been very busy with the life of Columbus since Irving wrote. The narratives of Ferdinand Columbus and of Las Casas, upon which he largely relied, have been somewhat discredited, and the character of the discoverer himself has not altogether escaped. Nor can it be denied that Irving’s lively fancy led him to embellish his account of certain dramatic passages in the life of Columbus with details which, while not improbable in themselves, are unsupported by documentary or other direct evidence. But the attempt of some subsequent writers, and notably of Irving’s countryman Winsor, to discredit him on that account has been carried beyond reason. Irving’s narrative of facts in the “Columbus” is conscientiously based upon primary sources; and his judgments, though occasionally over-indulgent of his hero, are in general sound. Columbus may not have been in all respects such a man as Irving represents him, but it is, at least, ennobling for the reader to believe that he was such a man.

In writing his “Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada from the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida,” Irving recurred to a device which he had already employed with success. Fray Antonio is no less mythical than the “small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker,” who was supposed to have left behind him, in his rooms at the Independent Columbian Hotel, that “very curious kind of a written book in his own handwriting” which, being presently printed “to pay off the bill for his board and lodging,” brought to its real author his first popularity. Nor can the “Granada” lay much stronger claim to be considered authentic history than Irving’s burlesque account of New York “from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty.” It is not, of course, predominantly humorous; but it is, in reality, merely a historical romance, adorned with bits from old chroniclers. In it Irving gave his imagination loose rein; and for that reason it is the most readable of his Spanish books.

His writings upon American history are less sympathetic. The matter of “Captain Bonneville” was fine in its facts, but it contained too little of the last to stimulate Irving’s romantic imagination, and it remained cold and almost crude under his shaping hand. In the founding of the settlement by which a butcher’s boy from Waldorf hoped to seize the mighty river of the West, there was also the stuff “of Romance,” and Irving’s “Astoria, or Anecdotes of Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains,” should transport the reader to

the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings.

In fact it continually brings his mind back to the ledgers of a too prosperous counting-house. Into the “Life of Washington” Irving was never able to put his heart. The book was the task-work of his declining years. It was undertaken at the suggestion of enterprising publishers, to whom he listened the more readily because the number of those dependent upon him had increased as the income from his earlier works declined. Its composition dragged from the outset. When at length the volumes appeared, they achieved a pronounced succès d’estime; but the work shows neither the firm grip of its subject nor the sustained vigour of treatment which might rank it among great biographies. It is rather a history of the United States during the latter half of the eighteenth century. There are entertaining anecdotes in it, vivid descriptions of battles, and sturdy American feeling. But of Washington himself there is only a pale shadow.

Irving’s position in American historiography is a peculiar one. He was not primarily a historian. In a sense he stands outside the main currents of our historical writing. Nevertheless, he had a strong influence in determining their course. His “Knickerbocker History of New York,” essentially a work of humour, was taken seriously by various of his fellow-townsmen, who were thus incited, much to Irving’s amusement, to undertake extensive studies in local history for the purpose of clearing their Dutch progenitors from his ridicule. He was the earliest among American men of letters to choose historical subjects for the exercise of his craft, and thus became the founder of the “picturesque school” of American historians, in which Prescott, Motley, and Parkman are his followers. And he was the first to feel the fascination which the power of Spain, in the Old World and in the New, has not ceased to exercise upon American writers of history ever since.

The New England School.—When the events of 1814, which promised a prolonged peace to Europe, had put an end likewise to the second war between Great Britain and her former colonists, the people of the United States, freed at last from their long subserviency to the inherited animosities of Europe, turned with confident elation to face the future problems of America. For the next half-century, while the frontier was advancing from the Ohio to the Mississippi, to the Missouri, to the “Great Stony Mountains,” and beyond them to the shores of the Pacific, the Western man was too much engrossed in the bustling business of making an empire to find time for writing its annals. It was, therefore, only in New England, in the section of the country farthest removed from the course of that breathless rush across the continent, that there existed the leisure as well as the wealth necessary for the study of historical books and documents. To wealth and leisure we must add, moreover,—as important conditions underlying the historical productiveness of New England—literary and political traditions, the possession of documents and other instruments of research, and, finally, the general intellectual tone of the extreme Eastern States—that part of the country most strongly affected by the civilisation of Europe. As Tyler points out, the earliest development of New England letters had taken place in those fields of half-literary effort which seek to provide the instruments or to record the acts of statesmen, in oratory and in history. And when, at the close of the Napoleonic wars, the intellectual influence of Europe upon America began to revive, and those forces which were to produce upon the Continent the Revolution of 1830 helped, on this side of the Atlantic, to excite the democratic turmoil of the Jacksonian era, it is not surprising that the new literary strivings, which manifested themselves somewhat widely in fiction and poetry, should take on in New England the form of historical narrative. The manner of this new historical movement was, in large measure, determined by the influence of German scholarship. It was from Göttingen that George Ticknor, afterward the historian of Spanish literature, wrote to his father in 1815, lamenting the “mortifying distance there is between an European and an American scholar. We do not know,” said he, “what a Greek scholar is; we do not even know the process by which a man is to be made one.” And it was in those bare halls of the old Georgia Augusta, at the feet of Heeren and Eichhorn and Dissen and Blumenbach, that other grateful New Englanders—among them George Bancroft and Edward Everett in Ticknor’s time, and Longfellow and Motley at a later day—learned something of the spirit of Continental scholarship. In this spirit the New England School of historians attempted, on the whole, to work. They were somewhat swerved, no doubt, by the esteem in which their countrymen still held the elaborate formalism of such orators as Webster and Everett, and, also, more to their advantage, by their own admiration for the picturesqueness of Irving, whose example encouraged them to treat by preference of foreign subjects. Still they stood firmly upon their native soil. Born among a people whose temperament, though shot through with a strain of idealism and even dashed at times with a touch of imagination, was still fundamentally sober, they were predisposed to honest care in inquiry and, save when the temptations of rhetoric seduced them, to accuracy of statement.

Thus even those historians of the New England School who had not enjoyed the advantage of European study preserved most of the traits of those who had. If Jared Sparks, a home-bred scholar who successfully conducted The North American Review in its earlier days (1817–18, 1823–30) and lived to become professor of history (1839–49) and president (1849–53) of Harvard University, had better understood the standards of Ranke and the “Monumenta Germaniæ Historica,” he might, indeed, have allowed himself less latitude than he actually took in editing the “Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution” (1829–30, 12 volumes), the “Works of Benjamin Franklin” (1836–40, 10 volumes), and especially the “Life and Writings of George Washington” (1834–37, 12 volumes). But the extent of his fault was greatly exaggerated by certain of his critics, and not even the most rigorous training could have enhanced the diligence with which he preserved these and other less important sources of our Revolutionary history. Mention of Sparks naturally suggests the name of Peter Force (1790–1868), another diligent compiler of facts. Force’s “American Archives ... a Documentary History” etc. (1837–53, 9 volumes, left incomplete) was published by Congress.

When we pass to the more illustrious writers of what has been called the classical period of historical writing in America, we discover two tolerably distinct tendencies. The one tendency appears in those men who were led to write by the spirit of the time and the place, and who wrote of America out of an ardent interest and a profound belief in the country and its political and social institutions. Foremost among these men stands George Bancroft. The other tendency appears in Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, who, though trained in the same atmosphere, were first men of letters and afterward Americans. They sought, not national and political, but picturesque and dramatic subjects, and these subjects lay, in large part, outside the history of their own country.

George Bancroft.—Bancroft spent the greater part of his long life (1800–91) upon his monumental history of the United States, a work that has occupied a high position among historical writings upon America. It was his ambition, as he announces in the Preface to his first volume (1834), to write “a history of the United States from the discovery of the American continent to the present time.” Although he anticipated years of work in the completion of the task, he could not have foreseen either that it was to consume more than half a century of his industrious life, or that the history itself was to end near the real beginning of the Republic. Bancroft was a writer inspired by his theme and exalted by the conception of his undertaking. Witness the opening sentences:

The United States of America constitute an essential portion of a great political system, embracing all the civilised nations of the earth. At a period when the force of moral opinion is rapidly increasing, they have the precedence in the practice and the defence of the equal rights of man. The sovereignty of the people is here a conceded axiom, and the laws, established upon that basis, are cherished with faithful patriotism. While the nations of Europe aspire after change, our constitution engages the fond admiration of the people, by which it has been established....

The rhetorical flavour of the passage is characteristic. Critics have been inclined to regard the style of the “History” as extravagant and perfervid. They have, perhaps, tended to overlook the influence of the sincere enthusiasm and robust patriotism of the early days of national organisation and growth. The book was undoubtedly suited to the spirit and the national ideals of the period. Note the tenor of contemporary opinion. Bancroft’s friend, Edward Everett, devoured the first volume as it fell from the press and hastened to congratulate the author (October 5, 1834): “I think that you have written a work which will last while the memory of America lasts; and which will instantly take its place among the classics of our language.... I could almost envy you to have found so noble a theme, while yet so young.” On the score of method, the “History” was generously applauded for its “exceedingly scrupulous care” by A. H. L. Heeren, the German historian and Bancroft’s earlier teacher at Göttingen. It was inevitable, however, that the patriotic fervour and sanguine tone of the book should suggest to wise heads a danger and a source of weakness. “Let me entreat you,” writes Gov. John Davis, the author’s brother-in-law, “not to let the partisan creep into the work. Do not imbue it with any present feeling or sentiment of the moment which may give impulse to your mind.... The historian is the recorder of truth and not of his own abstract opinions.” In still plainer speech did Thomas Carlyle complain that Bancroft was too didactic, going “too much into the origin of things generally known, into the praise of things only partially praisable, only slightly important.” And at a later time (1852) Henry Hallam wrote: “I do not go along with all your strictures on English statesmen and on England, either in substance, or, still more, in tone.... Faults there were, but I do not think that all were on one side. At all events, a more moderate tone would carry more weight. An historian has the high office of holding the scales.” In the midst of public affairs and political duties, the great labour of the “History” progressed. A second volume appeared in 1837, and a third in 1840. These volumes covered the colonial period down to 1748. Their conspicuous success contributed to Bancroft’s appointment, in 1846, as Minister to England; and there, as subsequently in Germany, his official position, added to his established reputation, opened to him unusual stores of historical material. He writes from England to Prescott, his “brother antiquary”: “I am getting superb materials, and had as lief a hundred should treat the same subject as not. If they do it with more heart than I, don’t you see that as a good citizen of the Republic I must applaud and rejoice in being outdone?” Under the circumstances, the democratic humility of the man is perhaps slightly overdone; although the unusual riches laid under contribution might well have offered a temptation to pride, for both public and private collections of great value were placed absolutely at his disposal. An unrivalled collection of historical manuscripts (now in the Lenox Library, New York City) bears testimony to his thoroughness and his wisdom in the use of extraordinary advantages.

But Bancroft, once established in London, soon found his literary labours pushed into the background. He confesses in 1849: “Here in London, to write is impossible.... Mr. Macaulay says, one man can do but one thing well at a time.... I am of his opinion, now in my approaching old age.” The eighteen years of private life at home that followed the ministry to England (1846–49) were much more productive. Between 1849 and 1867 six more volumes (iv. to ix.) of the “History” were brought out, a volume of “Literary and Historical Miscellanies” (1855), and the official eulogy pronounced upon Abraham Lincoln in the House of Representatives (1866). A passage from the “Miscellanies” on the conception of history displays Bancroft’s style in his more oratorical vein:

But history, as she reclines in the lap of eternity, sees the mind of humanity itself engaged in formative efforts, constructing sciences, promulgating laws, organising commonwealths, and displaying its energies in the visible movement of its intelligence. Of all pursuits that require analysis, history, therefore, stands first. It is equal to philosophy; for as certainly as the actual bodies forth the ideal, so certainly does history contain philosophy. It is grander than the natural sciences; for its study is man, the last work of creation, and the most perfect in its relations with the Infinite.

It was with gratification that Bancroft accepted in 1867 and held until 1874 the ministerial post at Berlin. The honour may have come as Bancroft’s reward for writing President Johnson’s first annual message (1865). At the close of the ministry appeared the tenth volume of the History: “The American Revolution. Epoch Fourth Continued. Peace between America and Great Britain, 1778–82” (1874). This at seventy-four years of age!

It was impossible, of course, that Bancroft should, at his advanced age, carry his work, as originally planned, through the nineteenth century. He determined, instead, to write the history of the organisation of the Federal Government. In 1882 came, accordingly, his “History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America” (2 volumes). Thus, at eighty-two, he had set forth in twelve generous volumes what may be called an introduction to the history of the country. It is indeed more than that, for, as the author himself somewhere remarks, the history of the United States begins with the united resistance of the colonies to Great Britain.

As an historical writer, Bancroft belongs to the period of his first volumes and not to that of his last. His interpretation of men and events rests upon his political philosophy, and his political philosophy was a heritage of the times of Andrew Jackson. To this philosophy he was faithful. Ranke, the German historian, once said to him, “Your history is the best book ever written from the democratic point of view.” Bancroft was aware of his democratic bias; but he would have denied with vehemence that this bias infused a subjective taint into his candour or laid a tinge of partiality upon his judgment. The “History” has been called an “epic of liberty.” It is philosophical, at times rhapsodical—not scientific—history. It treats an heroic theme in an heroic manner. Recent criticism of his method and political theories tends to obscure the brilliancy of his services to American historiography. Over and above the serious spirit in which he set about his task, the exacting search among contemporary sources, the unceasing devotion to truth, and an unsparing and prodigious industry, the broad and national character of the whole achievement calls for grateful recognition. Bancroft raised the history of America above the plane of provincialism and local interests, and set forth both the total march of internal events incident to national development and the manifold relations of the United States to the history of Europe. This wide perspective of events and causes would hardly have been possible except for years of residence, both as student and diplomat, in the capitals of Germany and Great Britain. In the matter of method also, Bancroft’s services to historical research must not be overlooked. He presented to Americans an object-lesson in the collection, criticism, and use of scattered materials. His distinction, then, as the founder of a new American school rests upon a double basis: his wide conception of a national history and his improved methodology in research. He reaped abundant success, both in the popular enthusiasm with which his books were hailed and in the extraordinary personal honours bestowed upon him until the time of his death. And it is no disparagement of his services to say that his great popularity rests rather upon a genius for catching up and reflecting the youthful spirit of genuine and uncritical Americanism than upon a capacity for setting down without passion and for interpreting without prejudice the human events of an inspiring epoch.

Contemporaries of Bancroft.—The writers of American history who came nearest to rivalling Bancroft in his own day were Richard Hildreth (1807–65), a vigorous New England leader writer and anti-slavery pamphleteer, and George Tucker (1775–1861), a Southern lawyer, who served for twenty years as professor of philosophy and political economy in the University of Virginia. Hildreth’s “History of the United States” (1849–52, 6 volumes) comes down to 1821, Tucker’s (1856–58, 4 volumes) to 1841. Both did careful work, though both have been criticised for their partisan leanings. Each gives a relatively large space to the Colonial and Revolutionary history of his own section. In the constitutional period, Hildreth commonly accepts the view of events most favourable to the Federalist party, whereas Tucker inclines to side even more strongly with the Democrats, of whose leader, Jefferson, he had published, in 1837, a sympathetic life. In connection with this branch of the New England School should be mentioned John Gorham Palfrey’s illustrious “History of New England” (1858–75, 4 volumes; a supplemental volume, edited by F. W. Palfrey, 1890). Palfrey was a graduate of Harvard and for several years the editor of The North American Review. His work is commonly regarded as the best of the colonial histories of New England; it occupies besides a secure place in American literature.

William Hickling Prescott.—Eminent among the men of the “classical” period who wrote picturesque and romantic histories, stands Prescott (1796–1859), author of “The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic” (1838), “The History of the Conquest of Mexico with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization and the Life of the Conqueror Hernando Cortés” (1843), “The History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas” (1847), “The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain” (1855–58), and other historical and literary works. “The Reign of Philip” was not finished, as Prescott suffered, during its preparation (1858), a shock of apoplexy, and died the following year. After working for ten years—so quietly that but few of his friends knew of the undertaking—upon his “Ferdinand and Isabella,” Prescott, upon its publication, found himself suddenly famous. “Love of the author gave the first impulse,” declared the author’s friend, Gardiner; “the extraordinary merits of the work did all the rest.” The American demand for the “History” was unparalleled, and all Europe sent liberal and judicious praise. Translations were called for in Russia, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

A bodily affliction, the partial loss of sight in early manhood, has lent a peculiar personal interest to Prescott’s heroic performances. He has been called, with but little exaggeration, “the blind historian.” During his junior year at Harvard, an accident destroyed the sight of one eye, and not long afterward the uninjured eye became permanently affected. A career in the practice of law had to be abandoned. Much of his subsequent life was spent in the dark. A great part of his historical labours had to be done with the aid of readers and secretaries. The task of mastering a language (he began Spanish at twenty-eight) and of collecting materials from libraries and archives would have seemed to be impossible. Nevertheless it was accomplished. The histories bear but little evidence of the writer’s physical infirmities. They are renowned for their accuracy and thoroughness. Recent ethnological discovery and advancement in historical method have, it is true, necessitated revision in certain statements of fact (e. g., regarding the social and private life of the Aztecs); but that is an accident of time. His thoroughness is attested by Jared Sparks, who knew of no historian, “in any age or language, whose researches into the materials with which he was to work have been so extensive, thorough, and profound as those of Mr. Prescott.” But the wide popularity of Prescott’s historical writings rests first upon their literary merits. He wrote in a clear, graceful, and dignified style upon epochs and personages that were surrounded by charm and romance. His power for pictorial representation was great. The admirable qualities of his books strongly suggest the author himself. He was cheerful, amiable, spontaneous, warm-hearted, and much beloved. At forty-five, Sumner said of him that he possessed the “freedom and warmth and frolic of a boy.” At the same time, Prescott’s capacity for self-criticism and for rigorous discipline was unusual. Without these qualities, he would hardly have succeeded in the face of painful disabilities. For many years it was his custom to analyse his powers and weaknesses, and to formulate exacting rules for his own guidance. At twenty-eight he wrote in his journal: “To the end of my life I trust I shall be more avaricious of time and never put up with a smaller average than seven hours’ intellectual occupation per diem.” About this time he wrote down a list of “rules for composition.” Among them are to be found these: “Rely upon myself for estimation and criticism of my composition;” “write what I think without affectation upon subjects I have examined;” “never introduce what is irrelevant or superfluous or unconnected for the sake of crowding in more facts.” He was early attracted toward historical writing, although he devoted much time to biography and critical reviews. The interest in Spanish history seems to have come from Ticknor’s lectures on Spanish literature, which Prescott heard at Harvard. The Ferdinand and Isabella theme first came to him in 1826. “The age of Ferdinand,” he remarks at this time, “is most important as containing the germs of the modern system of European politics.... It is in every respect an interesting and momentous period of history; the materials ample, authentic,—I will chew upon this matter, and decide this week.” The decision came, however, only after two years of further consideration. With Irving, Ticknor, and Motley, Prescott stands as one of the men who gave to the English-speaking world a clear and brilliant account of the history and literature of Spain. It is, however, a fact of still greater moment to American letters that Prescott should have embodied in permanent form a series of histories of great men and great events that is the common possession of the Old World and the New, and that marks the advancement of American historical writing beyond the limits of national feeling and national interest.

John Lothrop Motley.—Bancroft, Prescott, Motley (1814–77), and Parkman were all born and reared in the vicinity of Boston, and all were graduated from Harvard University. Motley and Bancroft continued their studies at Göttingen and Berlin. While in Germany, Motley enjoyed the friendship of Prince Bismarck, who was his fellow-student. “We lived,” said Bismarck, “in the closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise.” In 1841 Motley was appointed secretary to the American Legation at St. Petersburg; but he soon relinquished the post and returned to America. Ten years later he took up his residence in Europe, where he remained for half a decade pursuing historical studies. At the end of this time (1856) appeared “The Rise of the Dutch Republic: A History.” In 1860 came the first two volumes of “The History of the United Netherlands,” and in 1868 the last two. The continuation of the Dutch history came out in biographical form (1874) as “The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years’ War.” Meanwhile, Motley had been appointed to the American Ministry to Austria (1861) and to England (1869). Both appointments ended unhappily. An interesting circumstance connects Motley’s career with Prescott’s and, indirectly, with Washington Irving’s. With noble generosity, Irving had abandoned his well-formed plan of writing a Conquest of Mexico when he learned, through a common friend, of Prescott’s intentions in the same field. This act involved real sacrifice. “I had,” Irving afterward confesses, “no other subject at hand to supply its place. I was dismounted from my cheval de bataille, and have never been completely mounted since.” Prescott was presently to realise the cost of Irving’s surrender. For Motley, in turn, essayed to enter the field made illustrious by the author of “Ferdinand and Isabella.” In ignorance of Prescott’s plans for “The History of Philip,” Motley began his study of related subjects. The news then came to him as a blow. “For I had not,” Motley says, “first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself.” Prescott listened to the younger man’s proposal to retire, “with frank, ready, and liberal sympathy,” and insisted that Motley should proceed. More than this, he made handsome allusion, in the Preface to his “Philip,” to the forthcoming work on the revolt of the Netherlands. Motley wrote with zeal and enthusiasm. He loved liberty. The story of a people fighting for freedom fired his imagination. His ardour led him, naturally, toward the advocacy of favourite characters and parties; and the greater moderation of the Dutch historians themselves tends to support the charge of partiality. But Motley’s partiality was not mere partisanship. It rested upon a nice discrimination of the good and the bad, of the noble and the mean. His Dutch history is classic. It is renowned for its scholarly qualities and for its vivid colouring. Froude, without previous knowledge of the writer or of his work, placed “The Rise of the Dutch Republic” among “the finest histories in this or in any language.” While, by the more exacting standards of current schools, it is criticised for its lack of philosophical insight, it is still justly regarded as a faithful and striking picture of an heroic people.

Francis Parkman.—The New England School had told the story of the Spaniard in America and in the Netherlands. It was further to enrich its native literature by another brilliant history of the struggle for conquest of a great nation in foreign lands. Parkman (1823–93) is the historian of the rise and decline of France’s power in North America. Like Motley, he was captivated by an impressive and dramatic cycle of events, and—again like Motley—he possessed breadth of vision and tenacity of purpose sufficient to his task. Parkman had a passion for the wilderness;—a passion which he fed in youth and early manhood by excursions, large and small, to the woods, the prairies, and the mountains. In his twenties, he appears, a picturesque figure in the great West, living and hunting with Indians, eating pemmican, and playing host at a feast of dog-meat and tea. In spite of outdoor life and travel, Parkman was seldom well. A serious affection of the eyes, and nervous troubles which may have emanated from it, kept him, from his undergraduate days, either incapacitated or on the border-line of invalidism. He was tortured till his death by pain, lameness, insomnia, and at times almost complete blindness. His suffering and infirmities recall Prescott. It is not easy to decide which of the two men struggled more heroically against overwhelming odds. As early as his sophomore year at Harvard, Parkman planned to write the history of the “Old French War” for the conquest of Canada; “for here, as it seems to me,”—so he writes—“the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other passage of our history.” “The Oregon Trail”—an account of his adventures on the great plains and beyond—began to appear in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1847, and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” came out in 1851. Later, the plan widened to include the whole course of the conflict in America between France and England. The result was a series of books unexcelled in western historiography: “The Pioneers of France in the New World” (1865), “The Jesuits in North America” (1867), “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” (1869), “The Old Régime” (1874), “Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV” (1877), “Montcalm and Wolfe” (1884), and, finally, “A Half-Century of Conflict” (1892). The series received the general title, “France and England in North America.” In his “Montcalm and Wolfe,” Parkman reached the height of his fame. Wretched health turned the author’s attention to horticultural diversions. In 1871 he was appointed professor of horticulture in Harvard University; in 1866 he published his famous “Book of Roses.” His intimate knowledge of the scenes and peoples of whom he wrote and an engaging and finished manner impart to his historical books an unusual vivacity and charm. His work, while it is, as he intended, “a history of the American forest,” is also the history of two powerful and opposing systems of civilisation—“feudal, militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial, and Protestant England.” Less impulsive than Motley and less serene than Prescott, Parkman possessed at once the ardour and the restraint necessary to the vivid and impartial rendering of a glowing theme vastly important in the history of the New World. Himself cast in an heroic mould and exhibiting a fine type of the Puritan spirit, he was at home among chivalrous men and bold and impressive deeds. Jameson, writing of him shortly before his work was finished (see “The History of Historical Writing in America,” 1891), declares him to be, “next after one or two who survived from the preceding period, the most conspicuous figure in the American historiography of the last twenty-five years, the only historian who can fairly be called classical.”

Recent Historical Writings.—Since the Civil War America has been prolific in historical records. General histories and local histories abound; histories of administrations, of periods, of popular movements, indefatigable and scholarly researches in politics, war, finance, and social and economic institutions. The literary value of these records is not, however, to be inconsiderately judged from their bulk. Times and standards in American historiography have changed. Among the multitude of authors one must not look for many names which may be written down with those of Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Not that the modern period is wanting in good work or able writers. These are to be found in abundance. But most of the work belongs to science and not to letters; and besides, eminence is not fostered by the catholic distribution of talent and training. Jameson picks up Amiel’s blunt opinion that “the era of mediocrity in all things is commencing” and applies it to American historians. At the same time, this wise critic inclines to the belief that the vast improvement in technical process and workmanship realised within the present generation is the natural means to the development of a more substantial and more profound school of historians than the West has thus far created. The term “mediocrity” does not, indeed, do full justice to the period and the authors in question, and we must seek other grounds of excuse for the brevity of our review of them. These grounds are found, first, in the indirect importance to literature of the great mass of recent work, and, secondly, in the impossibility of setting the achievements of contemporary workers in just perspective.

The writers, great and little, of the periods already surveyed were, in large measure, self-trained. Until the last two or three decades, colleges and universities offered little incentive to methodical work upon historical subjects. Even Harvard, from whose doors went one after another the men who were to make the New England School famous, taught history only incidentally. Now, an academic school has arisen. Young men and women are trained in undergraduate and graduate studies by teachers who are themselves historical writers and investigators. Students are taught the discriminating use of historical instruments, and sound methods of reconstruction and interpretation. The change has been wrought under the unequal pressure of external influence, emphasis laid upon scientific method, a quickened consciousness of the importance and dignity of American history, and, finally, the example of those graceful and inspiring writers who gave to Western historiography an honourable place in the world’s literature. The academic school owes its existence to no single founder. It is, by its nature, a school of coöperative endeavour,—coöperation, first, between teacher and pupil, and coöperation, later, in the conjoint and organised labour of productive hands and brains. Among its early advocates and promoters were Charles Kendall Adams, university professor and president, teacher and historian, who adapted the German seminary method to the American university; Henry Adams, professor at Harvard University and author of a brilliant history in nine volumes (1889–91) of the country under Jefferson and Madison (1801–17); Justin Winsor, librarian, bibliographer, and editor of the useful and scholarly “Narrative and Critical History of America” (1884–89), and Herbert Baxter Adams, of Johns Hopkins, historian and instructor of historical students. The coöperative labours of the period have borne abundant fruit. Besides Winsor’s volumes should be mentioned “The American Nation: a History from Original Sources by Associated Scholars,” a gigantic work in twenty-seven volumes just finished (1904–8) under the editorship of Albert Bushnell Hart. The authorship is divided among a number of competent historical writers. The collection lays claim to being “the first comprehensive history of the United States, now completed, which covers the whole period” from the discovery of America to the present. Similar undertakings are, however, in progress, and a number of coöperative works of smaller scope are already in print. Other notable histories covering comparatively long periods of time are Edward Channing’s “A History of the United States,” to be completed in eight volumes; a series of nine volumes relating to preconstitutional times written by John Fiske, after the manner of Parkman, and including “The Critical Period of American History” (1888), “The Beginnings of New England” (1889), “The American Revolution” (1891), “The Discovery of America” (1892), etc.; James Schouler’s “History of the United States under the Constitution” (1880–99); “A Popular History of the United States” (1876–81), by William Cullen Bryant and Sydney H. Gay; “A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War” (6 of the 7 volumes published, 1883–1906), by John B. McMaster; “The Constitutional and Political History of the United States,” (1877–92), by Hermann E. von Holst, and “A History of the American People” (1902), by President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University. Channing’s attempt to cover, by the labours of a single competent scholar, the entire history of the country is comparable to that of George Bancroft. John Fiske wrote readable and popular narratives of historical events. He did much, both by books and lectures, to arouse general interest in matters of American life past and present. McMaster’s substantial and illuminating history is social rather than political. He seeks to portray the whole life of the people. Von Holst’s aim was, on the other hand, political. The author was a German-American. He held, among academic posts, professorships at Freiburg and the University of Chicago. His critical review, often disparaging to democratic institutions, may be taken as a counterblast to the ebullient patriotism of earlier, native writers. As the work of a foreign observer of American affairs, it suggests the reflections of de Tocqueville, of James Bryce, and of Goldwin Smith. President Wilson’s five volumes contain a wise and judicial commentary, in the form of a long and attractive essay, on the main course of events since the days of discovery. For the multitude of American historical writers who have treated single epochs, space permits mention of only one or two names. James Ford Rhodes’ “History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850” (7 volumes, 1902–6), the work of “nineteen years’ almost exclusive devotion,” is commonly regarded as the most thorough and best balanced study of the Civil War, its causes and its consequences. Henry Adams has, in his “History of the United States,” etc., investigated with competence and penetration the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.

This meagre list of the more important productions of the academic school clearly reveals the attraction of the American theme for the present American historian. Capable and impressive studies of foreign subjects there have been, it is true;—David Jayne Hill’s “History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe” and Henry C. Lea’s work on the medieval church are conspicuous instances;—but the great mass of research and writing has been gathered at home. Governmental affairs and political events loom large. Less interest has been taken in the subtler phases of national character and individual motive; although Fiske and McMaster and Woodrow Wilson and certain of the best biographers (whose important service to literature deserves separate consideration) represent a current tendency toward reflective and philosophical writing of a literary quality, which augurs well for the future of American historiography.

II. THE NOVELISTS

The Beginnings.—American fiction was one of the latest types of native literature to appear. The hard conditions of life imposed on the colonists by the necessity of clearing the forests and keeping the Indians in check were evidently unfavourable to sustained efforts in imaginative writing. And there were other reasons for the late growth of the novel. Except as they had a religious turn or an evident moral, stories were likely to be looked upon by the Puritans as a species of useless frivolity, which could have no part in the saving of souls.[3] Again, in the struggle with the mother country the robust and scholarly intellects of America had other matters to think of besides the elements of pure literature. The rights of man, the basis of resistance to tyranny, the principles of statecraft, the elements of democracy, were among the interests that absorbed the Washingtons, the Otises, and the Hamiltons of the latter part of the eighteenth century. But perhaps the most important reason for the tardy appearance of American fiction was the lack of tradition and legend. Of this Hawthorne complained as late as 1859, in the preface to “The Marble Faun”:

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.

Thus it was that for a long time Defoe and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne found no imitators in America. The American novel-reader, for the most part, was content with British provender, and satisfied his appetite for the marvellous with Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” Lewis’ “Monk,” and Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Romance of the Forest” and “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Toward the end of the eighteenth century several writers essayed the novel, but not with lasting success. In “The Foresters” (published serially in The Columbian Magazine, and in book form in 1792), Jeremy Belknap (1774–98) produced an ingenious though trivial allegorical tale of the colonisation of America and the rebellion of the colonies. In this, Peter Bullfrog stood for New York, Ethan Greenwood for Vermont, Walter Pipeweed for Virginia, Charles Indigo for South Carolina, and so on. Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752–83) was the author of “The History of Maria Kittle,” which in the form of a letter sets forth some harrowing experiences among the savages during the French and Indian War; and of “The Story of Henry and Anne,” a tale, “founded on fact,” of the misfortunes of some German peasants who finally settled in America; both of these were published posthumously in her “Works” in 1793. Mrs. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s “Charlotte Temple” (1790), a story of love, betrayal, and desertion, despite its absurdly stilted phrases and its long-drawn melancholy, has ever been popular with a certain class of readers; the editor of the latest edition (1905), Mr. Francis W. Halsey, has examined 104 editions, and his list is incomplete. An avowed antidote to “Charlotte Temple,” Mrs. Tabitha G. Tenney’s satirical “Female Quixotism” (1808), suggests to Professor Trent “an expurgated Smollett”; it is now unknown. Mrs. Hannah W. Foster, the wife of a clergyman in Massachusetts, wrote “The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton, a Novel Founded on Fact” (1797), a story of desertion, showing the marked influence of Richardson. In the same year, appeared “The Algerine Captive,” by Royall Tyler, who was one of the first to turn to American life as a fruitful subject for fiction. His story is a broadly humorous picaresque tale, of the Smollett type, which introduces rather too many wearisome details of customs in Algiers; a fault for which his generally spirited style and his powerful description of the horrors of a slave-ship partially atone.

Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816), the classmate at Princeton of James Madison and Philip Freneau, wrote “Modern Chivalry, or The Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant” (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, published in four parts, 1792–7), a modern “Don Quixote” narrating his experiences in the Whisky Insurrection of 1794. Though widely read in its day, especially by artisans and farmers, its literary worth was not sufficient to preserve it. “The Gamesters,” published in 1805 by Mrs. Catharine Warren, was likewise popular in its day; it attempted “to blend instruction with amusement.”

Charles Brockden Brown.—The history of the novel in America, therefore, properly begins with Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), who has been called “the first professional man of letters and important creative writer of the English-speaking portion of the New World.” He was born in Philadelphia of a good Quaker family; just forty years earlier, his uncle, Charles Brockden, had drawn up the constitution of the old Philadelphia Library Company. From early childhood, books were familiar to the youthful Brown, who became an omnivorous reader, and at Robert Proud’s school undermined his health by excessive devotion to reading and study, so that he was always an invalid. He took up the study of law, but soon abandoned it, despite the protest of his family, for the career of “book-making.” After some writing of verse and of essays, he published in 1798 a successful novel, “Wieland, or The Transformation,” and at once followed this with five others, “Ormond, or The Secret Witness,” (1799), “Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793” (1799–1800), in which he gave an account of the ravages of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, “Edgar Huntly, or The Adventures of a Sleep-Walker,” “Clara Howard” (1801), and “Jane Talbot” (published in England in 1804). From 1798 till 1801, Brown lived amid congenial surroundings in New York; in the former year he nearly died of yellow fever, to which his friend Dr. Elihu H. Smith succumbed. Returning to Philadelphia in 1801, he spent the remainder of his life there; marrying happily in 1804, editing The Literary Magazine, and writing political pamphlets and works on geography and Roman history, until consumption brought his busy and useful life to a premature end.

Brown’s novels mostly belong with the “tales of terror” so popular in his day. A radical thinker and analyst, he rejects supernatural agencies in his explanation of events, and relies wholly on natural causes; but this does not diminish the number of marvels in his tales. The plots of one or two of his stories will give an idea of the character of all. The scene of “Wieland” is laid on the banks of the Schuylkill, in Pennsylvania. The Wielands are a cultivated German family. Wieland’s father has died mysteriously by what is explained as self- or spontaneous combustion, and the son has inherited a melancholy and superstitious mind, which develops into fanaticism. The family hear strange voices giving commands or warnings or telling of events beyond the reach of human knowledge. A mysterious man, Carwin, appears, with such powers of pleasing that he becomes very intimate with the family. At length Wieland, at the command of what he takes to be a heavenly voice, sacrifices to God his wife and children. Confined in a maniac’s dungeon, he bears his fate with a sense of moral exaltation. Having escaped, he attempts to offer up also his sister, the narrator of the story, when he learns that he has been deceived by the ventriloquism of Carwin, whom malice has thus led to trick the family. In a frenzy, Wieland kills himself; Carwin disappears; and the story ends with the marriage of the sister and Pleyel, a brother of Wieland’s late wife and now a widower. Less powerful than “Wieland,” but still superior to Brown’s other works, is “Ormond.” An artist, Stephen Dudley, engaging in pharmacy to support his family, is brought to beggary through the villainy of his partner. His daughter Constantia bears up bravely through severe trials. Just when life appears brighter, Ormond comes upon the scene, a mysteriously powerful man, much like Falkland in Godwin’s “Caleb Williams,” of great wealth, strong mind, and base morals; he deserts Helena Cleves, who commits suicide, and pursues Constantia. Stephen Dudley is murdered by an unknown hand. Having a legacy from Helena, Constantia is about to sail for Europe with her friend (who narrates the story) when Ormond, finding her invincible, assaults her in a lonely house and meets death by her hand, after he has himself slain Craig, now revealed as the assassin of Dudley at Ormond’s instigation. Constantia afterward lives quietly with her friend in Europe. Brown’s plots are usually disfigured by irrelevant incidents and superfluous characters; he frequently changed his plans and even his heroines, and, writing with great rapidity, often with a greedy printer at his elbow, he utterly failed to weld together the elements of his stories and often to give them proper motivation. His characters are drawn in bold and clear outlines, but are frequently uninteresting—being too sentimental or inconsistent, or given to long and prosy soliloquies. It cannot be affirmed that Brown understood human nature well. Of style he had none; his pages are innocent of epigram or humorous turn; he employs very little dialogue and makes but scanty and awkward use of dialect. Yet in certain passages, in describing great crises, he exhibits considerable vividness and power. Brown’s chief merit consists in the sense of reality with which he contrives to invest his scenes of gloom and terror.

The power possessed by this rare genius, says Mr. James H. Morse,[4] of throwing gloomy characteristics into his theme, was equalled by no other American writer. In the matter of morbid analysis, Poe, in comparison with Brown, was superficial, Hawthorne was cheerful, and the modern school of French writers are feeble. With Poe, we can see that the gloom came by an effort of a spurred imagination; with Hawthorne, that it was the work of an artistic sense; but with Brown, it seems to have been constitutional—the gift at once of temperament and circumstances.

Brown was an admirer of William Godwin and obviously imitated not only his method of developing characters but also his style. It may be added that Brown in turn found many readers in England, where several of his novels were republished and where, as we have seen, “Jane Talbot” was first published. Professor Dowden quotes Peacock as saying that of all the works with which Shelley was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind were Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s “Robbers,” and Goethe’s “Faust.” Brown’s influence upon subsequent American writers, moreover, was not inconsiderable, and his place in our literature, if not high, is at least honourable.

John Davis, an Englishman about whom little is known, wrote several novels of American life, most of which were published here, and became somewhat popular. He lived in the United States from 1798 till 1802, and travelled over a large part of the country. His first novel, “The Original Letters of Ferdinand and Elizabeth” (1798), was a conventional story of seduction and suicide. It was followed by “The Farmer of New Jersey” (1800), “The First Settlers of Virginia” (1805), a pioneer historical novel, crude and ill managed, “Walter Kennedy, an American Tale” (London, 1805), and “The Post Captain” (1813). The most that can be said of these stories is that their author was shrewd and observant, and had some journalistic skill.

Mrs. Sally Keating Wood (1760–1855), wife of General Abiel Wood, of Maine, may be mentioned as the author of “Julia and the Illuminated Baron” (1800), which recalls the mysterious evil power and atheistic tendencies attributed to the Bavarian order of the Illuminati, established in 1775, which, though suppressed in 1780 by the Elector, was supposed to have secretly persisted and spread over Europe. Mrs. Wood wrote also “Dorval, or The Speculator” (1801), “Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue” (1802), “Ferdinand and Elmira, a Russian Story” (1804), and “Tales of the Night” (1827), besides several novels that were never published. Mrs. Wood placed many of her scenes in Europe.

Isaac Mitchell.—At Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1811, was published in two volumes “The Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa, an American Tale, Founded on Fact.” Of the author of this Gothic romance, Isaac Mitchell,[5] little is known save that he was successively the editor of The Farmer’s Journal, The Political Barometer, and The Republican Crisis, all of Albany, New York, and that after losing his position through political changes, he moved to Poughkeepsie. The story was later abridged and compressed into one volume by Daniel Jackson, Jr. (Mitchell’s name disappearing from the title-page), and in this form was long popular throughout America; Mr. Reed thinks that for nearly a quarter of a century a new edition appeared practically every year. The narrative is full of elaborate descriptions of nature.

Washington Irving.—In general Irving will be discussed rather with the essayists than with the novelists; but his stories and tales must be considered here. They have contributed largely if not chiefly to his enduring reputation. His first book, “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (1809), in which he works out a grotesquely humorous drama of the Dutch fathers wrestling with the weighty problems of statecraft, is of course in the main fictitious. No doubt it is at times pretentious or overdone, and the humour is occasionally a little too broad for the decorum of to-day; but the irrepressible spirit of comedy, the delightfully burlesqued descriptions of stolid Dutch character, the vivid though leisurely narrative, give it a supreme place in our humorous literature. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are doubtless the most read parts of “The Sketch Book” and have long since become classics; no more faithful narratives of quaint old Dutch life have ever been written. In them the boisterous exuberance of the “History” gives way to a more graceful, refined, and mature style, which invests the homely simplicity and contentment of colonial Dutch life with a kind of idyllic charm. Only a little less successful were Irving’s other stories of early New Amsterdam life—notably “The Money-Diggers” in “Tales of a Traveller,” and “Dolph Heyliger” in “Bracebridge Hall.” Inferior because more conventional and less spontaneous are the first three parts of the “Tales”; yet even here, in dealing with the sentimental and the terrible, Irving compares favourably with other story-tellers of his day. In the stories scattered through “The Alhambra,” Irving showed clearly that he had found another source of inspiration in the romantic legends of Spain and the Moors—legends full of Oriental mystery and of the splendid glories of old Spain, so charmingly and truthfully set forth that the Spaniards themselves spoke of him as “the poet Irving.” And “poet” he is in the large sense that he has created imperishable scenes and characters in that realm of romance in which we delight to wander, far from the prosaic world and the madding crowd.

James Kirke Paulding.—A contrast with Irving in more than one respect is afforded by James K. Paulding (1778–1860), the friend and collaborator of Washington Irving and the brother-in-law of William Irving. The author of “The Sketch Book” gave his whole life to the profession of letters; for Paulding, on the other hand, literary composition was only an avocation. The genial humour of Irving, too, differs from the satirical and ironical vein too often indulged in by his friend. Born in Dutchess County, New York, Paulding went to New York City while a young man and became associated with the Irvings in writing Salmagundi, the success of which gave Paulding confidence in himself and led him to further literary efforts. “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812), a loosely constructed and amateurish satire in the style of Arbuthnot, became very popular both in America and in England. “Koningsmarke, the Long Finne” (1823), now remembered only for the familiar assertion that “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” was a burlesque on Cooper’s “Pioneers.” Paulding’s most successful work, which deserves to live, was “The Dutchman’s Fireside” (1831), in which are charming descriptions of quaint Dutch customs and personages, of the picturesque scenery of the Hudson, and of the vast expanse of wilderness that stretched to the westward. In general, however, Paulding’s work was characterised by a too harsh and obstreperous Americanism, an immoderate and amusing hostility to foreigners, and a carelessness of workmanship which prevented it from enduring long.

Samuel Woodworth.—As a curiosity must here be mentioned the long-forgotten “Champions of Freedom” (1816) of Samuel Woodworth (1785–1842). It was his one essay in fiction; a history of the War of 1812 in the style of a romance. It must be described as a chaotic miscellany, blending wild romance with commonplace realism, and conducting the reader from ballroom to battlefield and back again with the least possible suspicion of method or motive.

John Neal.—Born in Portland, Maine, and beginning life as a shop-boy in Boston, John Neal (1793–1876) became in turn a wholesale dry-goods merchant, a lawyer, and a voluminous critic, poet, and novelist. He boasted that in thirty-six years he had written enough altogether to fill a hundred octavo volumes; yet to-day he is little more than a name. His first novel, “Keep Cool,” which he afterward spoke of with justice as a “paltry, contemptible affair,” appeared in 1817. His best novels are “Seventy-Six” (1823), a lively story of the Revolution, “Rachel Dyer” (1828), a story of the Salem Witchcraft, and “The Down-Easters” (1833), an extravagant tale which deals with the ways of steamboat passengers, and into which he manages to introduce plenty of horrors. Neal has been well styled “the universal Yankee, whittling his way through creation, with a half-genius for everything, a robust genius for nothing.” He is said to have been the originator of the woman’s suffrage movement, the first person to establish a gymnasium in America, and the first to encourage Edgar A. Poe.[6]

James Fenimore Cooper.—The first American to win universal recognition as a powerful novelist was James Fenimore Cooper. Born at Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, of English Quaker and Swedish parentage, he was taken, when a year old, to the Central New York wilderness, where his father, having become the owner of large tracts of land, had laid out the village of Cooperstown. Here, on the shores of the beautiful Otsego Lake, in a motley frontier settlement, the boy Cooper passed his earliest years. In due time entering the family of an Albany clergyman as a private pupil, Cooper proceeded in 1803 to Yale College, where he became a member of the class of 1806. An escapade in his third year led to his dismissal; after which he served a marine apprenticeship of a year and then entered the navy, serving as midshipman for nearly four years. In 1811, he married Susan A. De Lancey, a lady of Huguenot and Tory family, and a sister of Bishop De Lancey of Western New York; and at her request resigned his commission, to become an amateur farmer, successively at Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, at Cooperstown, and at Scarsdale, Westchester County, all in New York State. Thus he arrived at the age of thirty without having even dreamed of a career of authorship. One day, reading a novel descriptive of English society, he impatiently threw down the book and exclaimed that he could write a better story himself. Challenged by his wife to do so, he wrote and published “Precaution” (1820), a dull and conventional story of English social life, purporting to be the work of an Englishman. Although the novel was not very successful, his friends urged Cooper to try again, and this time to write of scenes of which he had some personal knowledge. The publication of “The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground,” in December, 1821, marks the beginning of a long series of successes. “The Spy” met with a large sale both in America and in England. It was soon translated into most of the cultivated languages of Europe; and its popularity has never greatly waned. It is a story of the American Revolution, in which the patriotic hero, Harvey Birch, signally aids the American cause and exhibits a rare combination of the spy and the gentleman.

During the twenty-nine years remaining to Cooper, he produced thirty-two further volumes, chiefly romances. Of these, many are now rarely read, but the following have retained their popularity for successive generations:

“The Spy,” already referred to.

“The Leatherstocking Tales,” comprising (in the chronological order not of their production, but of the narrative):

“The Deerslayer, or The First War Path,” 1841.

“The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757,” 1826.

“The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea,” 1840.

“The Pioneers,” 1823, and “The Prairie,” 1827; and ten volumes of the “Sea Tales”:

“The Pilot,” 1823.

“The Red Rover,” 1828.

“The Two Admirals,” 1842.

“Homeward Bound, or The Chase,” 1838.

“The Water-Witch, or The Skimmer of the Seas,” 1830.

“The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet,” 1842.

“Afloat and Ashore,” 1844.

“Miles Wallingford,” 1844, published in England as “Lucy Hardinge.” A sequel to “Afloat and Ashore.”

“Jack Tier, or The Florida Reefs,” 1848.

“The Sea Lions, or The Lost Sealers,” 1849.

The popularity which Cooper achieved, and which reached its height with the publication of “The Last of the Mohicans,” was most remarkable; no other American has ever enjoyed anything like it. Not only were his stories read in well-nigh every household, but they were promptly dramatised, and furnished subjects for numerous paintings and poetical effusions. In Europe, his fame fairly rivalled that of Scott. In 1833, Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, wrote: “In every city of Europe that I visited the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They are published, as soon as he produces them, in thirty-four different places in Europe. They have been seen by American travellers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan.”

In 1822 Cooper removed with his family to New York, in order to be near his publisher and to put his daughters into school. There he founded a club, commonly known as the Bread and Cheese, to which many of the noted men of the time belonged. The years 1826–33 he spent in Europe, being for a part of this time United States consul at Lyons. On his return, he lived a few winters in New York; he then took up his permanent residence at Otsego Hall, Cooperstown, where he died in September, 1851.

In his later years, Cooper presented the singular spectacle of a popular novelist who was the most cordially hated man of his time. The fact is significant and helps to account for the failure of many of Cooper’s later stories. An ardent lover of his country and its republican institutions, he boldly rebuked the ignorance and supercilious condescension of European critics; he wrote “The Bravo” (1831), “The Heidenmauer” (1832), and “The Headsman” (1833), for the avowed purpose of assailing monarchical and praising democratic institutions, and kept this purpose in mind much too constantly to produce artistic work. On his return to America, contrasting the restless exertion and bustle, the material progress which obscured higher ideals than money-making, with the leisure and dignified culture of European lands, he did not hesitate to speak plainly of the defects in the American character. This naturally brought him much abuse from the press; and an unfortunate dispute with the citizens of Cooperstown over the ownership of Three-Mile Point on Otsego Lake, though the right was wholly on his side, only made him more intensely disliked.

In the early ’40’s, certain issues arose in New York State between the tenants of the old Patroons who held their large estates under original grants, and their landlords, the tenants attempting to secure under State legislation a title in fee to their rented lands. Cooper, whose family interests were themselves likely to be affected by these claims, threw himself with full force and bitterness into the contest. In addition to a number of magazine articles and speeches, he devoted three volumes to the presentation of the claims of the landlords, volumes which are now read but little, excepting by special students of the subject. They are entitled respectively:

“Satanstoe, or The Littlepage Manuscripts,” 1845;

“The Chainbearer,” 1846; and

“The Redskins, or Indian and Injin,” 1846.

“The Ways of the Hour” (1850) was also a novel with a purpose, which overweighted its interest as a story; the purpose was the reform of court procedure in the State of New York.

In “Homeward Bound” and its sequel, “Home as Found” (1838), the latter being one of his worst stories, Cooper lashed the petty vices of his countrymen and sought to show them what ought to be. As he might have expected, he only confirmed the public in its hatred of him, while he materially impaired his reputation as a story-teller. Had he been more tactful, philosophical, and far-seeing, he would have saved himself years of stormy conflict.

In Lakewood Cemetery at Cooperstown, on the hill overlooking Otsego Lake, is a majestic monument to Fenimore Cooper, twenty-five feet in height, and surmounted by a statue of the hunter Leatherstocking and his dog. As enduring as bronze is this character in our American fiction; the hero that will live longest of Cooper’s creations. In him Lowell found “the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry.” The series in which he appears, “The Deerslayer,” “The Pathfinder,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Pioneers,” and “The Prairie,” the group which Cooper himself preferred to his other stories, is now (excepting always “The Spy”) more read than all Cooper’s other works put together. Drawn at first from life, Natty Bumppo becomes an idealised character, the perfect type of the bold frontiersman and scout, who read nature as an open book, and who was most at home when farthest from the haunts of the civilised world. Worthy to stand by his side is the noble Indian Chingachgook, “grave, silent, acute, self-contained,” as Mr. James H. Morse says of him; “sufficiently lofty-minded to take in the greatness of the Indian’s past, and sufficiently farsighted to see the hopelessness of his future,—with nobility of soul enough to grasp the white man’s virtues, and with inherited wildness enough to keep him true to the instincts of his own race.” Famous among Cooper’s sailor folk is Long Tom Coffin, of “The Pilot”—type of the rough but honest seaman, superstitious like all seamen but devoutly religious, faithful to the last and capable of the most heroic self-sacrifice. Other characters scarcely less well drawn, if less famous, move through Cooper’s pages—rough, uncouth waifs and strays of border life, grizzled old sea-dogs, soldiers’ and sailors’ wives and sweethearts, such as the wife of Ishmael Bush, Hetty and Judith Hutter, and Dew-of-June.

That he exhibited marked imperfections in style and technique no one will deny. He wrote too rapidly to attain to anything like elegance of style, and he is not infrequently obscure. He continually repeats words and expressions, to the great annoyance of the reader. The same carelessness that characterises his style is occasionally seen in the construction of his stories. Scenes are repeated. Mistakes due to forgetfulness occur, as in “Mercedes of Castile,” where the heroine presents her lover, on his outward voyage, with a cross of sapphire stones, emblems, she tells him, of fidelity, which later appear as turquoise stones. Peculiarities of habit or manner are referred to so continually that the reader becomes weary and disgusted. Numerous characters are, it must be admitted, conventional in the extreme. Cooper failed signally in his fine women. They are not creatures of flesh and blood; they are purely imaginary creatures in petticoats, mere simulacra, invariably paragons of sweetness, discretion, and artlessness, ever saying and doing the correct thing until the reader longs for a little less of the angel and a good deal more of Mother Eve. Finally, his introductions are exceedingly prolix and tedious, though in this respect he sinned in company with Scott and many another of the time.

But we must not let this catalogue of Cooper’s defects obscure his virtues. In spite of occasional carelessness of construction, all his best stories are highly interesting; he spins a good yarn. Never straining after effects, never loading his sentences with ornaments, when once started he moves straight ahead to his goal; one stirring scene follows another; there is wonderful fertility of resource, set forth with the confidence that begets faith. His was a large genius, which, though unsuccessful at miniature work, could manage a large canvas marvellously well. It must not be forgotten that Cooper was a pioneer; that he was the creator of our American romance of forest and prairie and sea. His descriptions of nature are done with the hand of a master. “If Cooper,” remarked Balzac, “had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.” Moreover, Cooper’s stories are honest and wholesome like himself; they breathe the same genuineness, the same sincerity and hatred of shams and meanness; they uniformly hold up noble and worthy ideals; their tone is always as healthful and invigorating as a breath of ozone. As Professor Trent remarks, he “lifted the story of adventure into the realms of poetry”; and as the poet of the primeval American forest he has never been superseded.

Professor Lounsbury, whose Life of Cooper, in the “American Men of Letters” Series, remains the authoritative biography, sums up the man and his work as follows:

America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature, and no more heroic soul.

Mr. W. C. Brownell prepared for the Iroquois Edition of Cooper’s Works a critical introduction which may safely be accepted as the most just, most delicate, and most comprehensive analysis of the man and of his work. Mr. Brownell writes:

There is a quality in Cooper’s romance, however, that gives it as romance an almost unique distinction. I mean its solid and substantial alliance with reality. It is thoroughly romantic, and yet—very likely owing to his imaginative deficiency, if anything can be so owing—it produces, for romance, an almost unequalled illusion of life itself.... Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a jardin des plantes; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of “settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities of its farther shore—the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in the literary parliament of the world.

The Elder Dana.—Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), lawyer, politician, poet, critic, and novelist, was one of the group of Boston writers that laid the foundations of New England literature. His tales, “Tom Thornton” and “Paul Felton,” are romantic stories of villainy and insanity, and give evidence of the influence of Brockden Brown. The narrative has at times an impetuous sweep that hurries the reader along in spite of himself; and the characterisation is wrought with powerful strokes. A collective edition of his “Poems and Prose Writings” appeared in 1833.

Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child.—Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) was the daughter of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was principal of a young ladies’ school for half a century. Her duties as a teacher did not prevent her from becoming a voluminous novelist. Her first story was “A New England Tale” (1822), which at once found favour. “Redwood” (1824) was translated into three or four Continental languages; on the title-page of the French translation, the novel was ascribed to Fenimore Cooper. Other novels which achieved great popularity for their faithful portraiture of early and contemporary New England life were “Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts” (1827), “Clarence, a Tale of Our Own Times” (1830), “The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America” (1835), and “Married or Single” (1857). While Miss Sedgwick never rises to the height of absorbing interest, she is rarely dull, and some of her women, if we allow for the difference in time, do not suffer in comparison with those of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman. Her descriptions of simple country life were superior to any that had hitherto appeared. Mrs. Child, born Lydia Maria Francis (1802–1880), who likewise spent her life in Massachusetts, began writing early, producing her first novel, “Hobomok,” in 1824 and her second, “The Rebels,” a year later. The former deals with Salem life in colonial times; the latter is a story of the Revolution, describing the sack of Governor Hutchinson’s house and the Boston massacre. Although they give true pictures of early Puritan customs, they are not powerful as fiction. In 1836 she essayed a more ambitious flight in “Philothea,” a romance of the days of Pericles, which, in spite of its stilted rhetoric, reveals some imaginative power and deserves mention as a pioneer attempt to interpret Greek life to America.

Timothy Flint.—A voluminous writer and in his day a well-known figure was Timothy Flint (1780–1840), a native of Reading, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1800. Becoming a Congregational minister, in 1815, in search for health, he crossed the Alleghany Mountains with his family, and after travelling in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, became a missionary, first at St. Charles, Missouri, and then in Arkansas. The success of his “Recollections of the Last Ten Years” (1826) led him to publish a novel, “Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot” (1826), dealing with adventures with the Comanche Indians, and with the Mexican struggle of 1821, which resulted in the fall of Iturbide. The story was crude and improbable, but some of its descriptions found favour. “Arthur Clenning,” his second novel, published in 1828, includes a shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, after which the hero and heroine arrive in New Holland and later settle in Illinois. He wrote some other novels, but none has survived. For a time (1833), Flint edited The Knickerbocker; and in 1835 he contributed some “Sketches of the Literature of the United States” to the London Athenæum.

William Austin (1788–1841) a lawyer of Charlestown, Massachusetts, deserves to be noticed for the remarkable story of “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” which he wrote for The New England Galaxy (1827–8; reprinted in “The Boston Book,” 1841, and in other books and papers). The theme is the same as that of “The Wandering Jew.” While “originating in the inventive genius of its author,” as Joseph Buckingham says of it, it doubtless owed something also to German romance.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.—The greatest genius among American writers of romance, by many held to be the supreme literary artist of America, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was peculiarly a product of New England and frankly admitted that New England was quite as large a lump of earth as his heart could take in. His ancestor, William Hathorne, came to the New World in 1630, in the ship with John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, and became a leader in the colony. Hathorne’s son John was one of the judges in the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1691. The grandfather and father of Nathaniel Hawthorne were both sea-captains. The novelist was born at Salem on July 4, 1804. Four years later, his father, never apparently a robust man, died at Surinam, and the widowed mother began to live in a deep seclusion which could not fail to have its effect upon the quick sensibilities of her son. In 1818, the family removed to Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. Hawthorne’s boyhood environment, therefore, was not widely different from that of Fenimore Cooper. But he was more of a reader than Cooper. As a boy, he became familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and Godwin. Entering Bowdoin College, he was graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow. While he did not distinguish himself in his studies, he became a respectable Latin and English scholar; and he devoted much time to reading in the little library of the Athenæan Society. At graduation, he ranked eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight. Meanwhile his family had returned to Salem, and thither Hawthorne now went, to begin a period of literary apprenticeship. It was seemingly a bold undertaking to attempt to live by his pen; however, he seems to have drifted into the attempt through aversion to a more active life. In 1828, he published anonymously a novel called “Fanshawe,” dealing with some of his college experiences and recalling vaguely the methods of Scott. Some characters, it must be said, are vigorously conceived, and here and there the volume gave promise of the author’s future skill; but there is about the whole a suggestion of unreality, not to say crudeness. The book found, as it deserved, an indifferent public, and Hawthorne subsequently recalled as many copies as he could procure and burned them. For several years, he continued to live in seclusion, contributing stories and sketches to various annuals and periodicals. For the stories he got $35 each. In March, 1837, having been encouraged by his friend Horatio Bridge, he published the first volume to appear with his name, “Twice-Told Tales.” They were eighteen in number, being only half of the stories he is known to have printed up to this time. The “Tales” gave Hawthorne a considerable reputation; Longfellow praised it in The North American Review, then influential in literary affairs. Again helped by his friends, in January, 1839, Hawthorne assumed the position of weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-House. At first, the novelty of contact with the practical world interested him; but he soon found that his work, always monotonous, left him no time or strength for writing, and he was not sorry to lose his post when the Whigs came into power in 1841. For a few months, he tried life at Brook Farm, thinking that in this new community he should find a suitable way of combining manual and intellectual labour; but the work was too hard, and he had too little opportunity for writing. Accordingly in 1842 he left the Farm, married Miss Sophia A. Peabody, to whom he had been engaged for four years, and settled at the Old Manse, an idyllic retreat at Concord, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, he had published (1841) two volumes of historical tales for young people, “Grandfather’s Chair” and “Famous Old People”; and to these he now added a third series, “The Liberty Tree,” as well as a second series of “Twice-Told Tales” and a volume of “Biographical Stories for Children” (1842). Of these, none except the “Tales” rises much above the level of respectable writing to sell. In the next four years, Hawthorne wrote for periodicals some eighteen more tales, which, together with a number of earlier uncollected stories, he republished in 1846 as “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Hawthorne now returned to his native Salem as surveyor of customs (1846–9), and proved an able administrator of the office. Another period of literary barrenness ensued, but in 1847 he resumed his writing and produced a few tales. The idea of a longer romance had come to him, and after his dismissal from office in 1849 he found the leisure necessary for writing “The Scarlet Letter.” Once more, then, he exchanged the world of affairs for that realm of the imagination where he was so much more at home. Working resolutely amid sickness and poverty, he at length completed the splendid romance, the publication of which distinguishes the year 1850 in American letters as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Wordsworth’s “Prelude” do in English poetry. Hawthorne had now entered upon a period of great productivity. In the next two years he published “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), “A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys” (1851), “The Snow Image and Other Tales” (1851), “Tanglewood Tales,” (1852), “The Blithedale Romance” (1852), a tale based on his Brook Farm life, and a campaign “Life of Franklin Pierce,” his college friend, now a candidate for the Presidency. Promptly after his election, President Pierce made Hawthorne consul at Liverpool, an office which he held from July, 1853, until September, 1857. Though rich in experience and in fruitful observation, his life in England was outwardly quiet and uneventful. The years 1857–9 the Hawthornes spent in Italy, where they mingled somewhat more with the world than had been their wont. The fruit of the Italian life was “The Marble Faun” (1860), written in Italy and at Redcar, on the shore of the North Sea, and published in England as “Transformation.” Returning to America in 1860, Hawthorne passed the next four years at the Wayside, Concord. In 1863 he contributed “Our Old Home” to The Atlantic Monthly and began “The Dolliver Romance,” which he was destined not to finish. He died suddenly on May 18, 1864, at Plymouth, N. H., while on a journey to the New Hampshire lakes in search of health.

His literary remains must be at least mentioned. In 1868 appeared “Passages from American Note-Books”; in 1870, “Passages from English Note-Books”; and in 1871, “Passages from French and Italian Note-Books.” These volumes throw much light on Hawthorne’s favourite haunts and wandering propensities, as well as his eagerness for minute observation. “Septimius Felton, or, The Elixir of Life” (1871) was to be a story, placed in Revolutionary times, of a man who sought earthly immortality. The theme was a powerful one; but Hawthorne’s strength was evidently exhausted, and the story must be pronounced a failure. The last works to appear were “The Dolliver Romance” (1876) and “Doctor Grimshaw’s Secret,” which are fragmentary and ineffective studies of the same theme as “Septimius Felton.” Their failure, in all probability, was due not only to the waning of Hawthorne’s powers but also to the difficulties attending the theme itself.

Hawthorne was one of the shyest of men. Kenyon, in “The Marble Faun,” says: “Between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf”; such a gulf at any rate separated Kenyon’s creator from the rest of mankind. Always fond of solitude, he lived in a world of his own, apart from humankind; longing at times for more familiar converse with men, but never quite successful in establishing cordial relations (outside of his own family) with any but a few friends. Possessed of an exquisitely sensitive nature, he made no effort to conceal the pleasure which honest praise afforded him; and he was easily rebuffed by the coolness of his public. Perhaps the bane of his life was self-distrust. Each of his books when first written seemed to him well-nigh worthless. James T. Fields has told of the difficulty with which he extracted from Hawthorne the first manuscript of “The Scarlet Letter.” “Thus it is with winged horses,” says Hawthorne in “The Chimæra,” “and with such wild and solitary creatures. If you can catch and overcome them, it is the surest way to win their love.” Such was the devotion with which Hawthorne repaid those who had “captured” him that their confident encouragement greatly strengthened and inspired him. As might be supposed, however, with the world at large he was lacking in sympathy. His point of view was fixed; he could not see the world with the eyes of another. This helps to account for the effect of harshness and asperity which his chapter on “The Custom House” in “The Scarlet Letter” had upon the people of Salem whom he there described; and for the similar effect of the descriptions of English life in “Our Old Home” upon the English people in general. As Professor Woodberry remarks, too, he had “the critical spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking his mind.” He had, moreover, deeply rooted prejudices and a natural hatred of shams. He disliked literary friendships. While in England, for example, he remained a stranger to the brilliant literary set in London where he might have been warmly welcomed. He saw Tennyson once in Manchester, but made no effort to meet the poet. Another of his aversions concerned the manifestations of spiritualism—rappings, tipping of tables, spirit writing, and the like; he was a good hater of shams in general.

To his family, Hawthorne was always deeply devoted. When his mother died, although there had always been “a sort of coldness of intercourse” between them, he spoke of the time as the darkest hour he had ever lived through. His wife worshipped him, and the attitude of his children is sufficiently indicated by the words of his son Julian: “In my thought of him he has a quality not to be described; that is associated with the early impressions which make the name of home beautiful; with a child’s delight in the glory of nature; with a boy’s aspirations towards a pure and generous career; with intimate conceptions of truth, bravery, and simplicity.”

So much for the man; what now, shall be said of the artist? In the first place, as he was the peculiar product of New England Puritanism, so his genius was in a sense confined to setting forth New England and the problems of New England Calvinism. Even when he lays the scene of his tale in Rome, there is the same interest in the working out of the consequences of sin, and part of the characters are Americans living in the Eternal City. Hawthorne still stands alone in having given supreme literary expression to that earnest and virile if narrow and at times misguided life of early New England; its pathos, its tragedy, its legacy to modern times. Then it must be observed that in doing this he places himself in the ranks of the great masters in deducing from the individual the general experience; from the particular the universal moral life. In his earlier years he delighted in allegory, of which the “Tales” and the “Mosses” are full; and he was always fond of symbolism. Lady Eleanore’s mantle, for example, is a symbol of pride; the scarlet letter is a symbol of sin; no less is Donatello a symbol, a type of universal innocence tasting of the knowledge of good and evil—the missing link, as it were, in the evolution of moral instincts. Hawthorne constantly describes the unseen in terms of the seen, the spiritual world by means of the every day, material world.

The “Tales” have been most elaborately characterised by Professor Woodberry in his admirable biography.[7] Many of them are intrinsically slight—descriptions of the common events of daily life, always somewhat moralised, and to an increasing extent as the author grew older. In some the fancy has free rein, as in “The Seven Vagabonds” and “The Great Stone Face.” In “Tales of the Province House” and many others Hawthorne skilfully wove threads of colonial history with the rich woof of his imagination to produce a splendid romantic pageant. Sometimes he treats of individuals, as in “David Swan” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; often he studies the group, or the crowd, as in the “The Celestial Railroad,” “The Christmas Banquet,” “The Procession of Life.” In all, he studies the moral life and tries to understand the significance of some phase of universal human experience.

“The Scarlet Letter” has been called by Mr. James “the most distinctive piece of prose fiction that was to spring from American soil.” It is a grim tragedy, in which the consequences of sin are depicted with a simplicity, a steady movement, and a relentlessness characteristic of the tragedies of Euripides. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale living agonised lives which moved steadily towards the day of expiatory shame; Roger Chilingworth, outwardly the wise, benevolent physician, inwardly the ghastly demon gloating over his victim—these figures indeed move us to pity and fear, and give us a new sense of the depth and mystery of our human life, which no man liveth to himself alone, but which must be interpreted as the expression and result of racial upstriving through myriads of years. “The Scarlet Letter” is indeed, as Mr. W. C. Brownell says,[8] the Puritan “Faust”; and many will doubtless agree with him in calling it “our one prose masterpiece.”

In “The House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne returns to the present and studies the workings of heredity. Less gloomy than the earlier story, this one is still sombre and in part removed from the world of objective reality. Real enough, to be sure, are the commonplace features of daily life at the Seven Gables, the pinched features and heroic heart of Hepzibah, and the homely philosophising of Uncle Venner; but Jaffrey and Clifford Pyncheon are at best shadowy and unreal. Holgrave, too, belongs to a type which, common enough in the days of Brook Farm Fourierism, has now well-nigh passed away. Phœbe Pyncheon is one of the most delicate and exquisite of all Hawthorne’s portraits; as Dr. Holmes wrote to the author, “the flavour of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phœbe.” It is interesting to note that when the book appeared Hawthorne wrote to his friend Horatio Bridge:

“The House of the Seven Gables,” in my opinion, is better than “The Scarlet Letter”; but I should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation, nor if the romance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write.

More able critics than one have pronounced “The Blithedale Romance” the most perfect of Hawthorne’s stories. Although he wrote to George William Curtis that the story had essentially nothing to do with Brook Farm, it is certain that the community formed more than a background for the story, and furnished some of its incidents and the traits of some of the characters. Thus the romance may be said to approach more closely to real life than any other of the greater works. The characters are drawn with great distinctness of outline: Hollingsworth the reformer, earnest, stern, engrossed in his reform undertaking to the point of selfishness; Miles Coverdale, the dreamer, who bears the ear-marks of his artist creator, always a spectator of, rather than a participant in, the life at Blithedale; Priscilla, the timid maid who seemed to have dropped down from the clouds and sought protection in this retreat; Zenobia with her splendid beauty, her refinement, her ardour, her despair when disillusionment comes—all these are highly individualised. It has been complained, and with justice, that neither Zenobia nor Priscilla is a typical New England girl; but something may perhaps be conceded to the romantic atmosphere of the tale; the author did not promise a transcript from prosaic real life. The plot halts now and then, and does not move steadily and convincingly to its climax. The inserted story of “The Veiled Lady” does not materially further the plot. Yet as a whole the romance is a searching and remarkable presentment of Hawthorne’s views of reform. He was never a reformer; he distrusted the excess of zeal, the narrowness of vision too often characteristic of the more ardent reformers of his day; and with great skill he has here set forth the illusory hopes, the discouragement, the sense of impotence and defeat that must attend the outcome of radical schemes for human improvement which are not grounded on sound and wide knowledge of man’s nature.

Probably the most popular, as it was the most ambitious, of all the romances, has been “The Marble Faun.” With consummate skill the author maintains the mystery necessary for the romantic atmosphere and at the same time draws in clear outlines the four characters in the little drama—this miniature world-tragedy, this “story of the fall of man repeated,” as Miriam says. As Mr. Lathrop has pointed out, moreover, with the main theme, itself of abiding interest, is joined a study of the psychology of Beatrice Cenci’s story; but, without stopping where Shelley stopped, Hawthorne went on to show how Miriam and Donatello might “work out their purification.” Thus while the romance may, as one critic avers, “begin in mystery and end in mist,” the end is nevertheless full of hope.

Hawthorne has never been, and doubtless never will be, a popular novelist. His stories are for the few, the thoughtful readers who are willing to read old favourites over and over again. But there will always be such persons, haply in increasing numbers; and for them Hawthorne will continue to be a unique personality, the “high untrammelled thinker,” the interpreter of spiritual mysteries.

Charles Sealsfield.—Although not mentioned by most historians of American literature, the Austrian novelist Carl Postl (“Charles Sealsfield,” 1793–1864) deserves to be recalled here from the fact that his works deal chiefly with American life and in their English form enjoyed considerable popularity in America. Born in Poppitz, Moravia, he became at first a priest of the order of the Kreuzherren von Pöltenberg; but, having broken with Catholic dogma, he fled from the cloister and arrived in New York in 1823 as Charles Sealsfield. He remained in America until 1832, travelling extensively and making close studies of life and character. His first novel, “Tokeah, or The White Rose; an Indian Tale” (Philadelphia, 1828), was republished at Zurich in 1833 as “Der Legitime und die Republikaner”; while never a popular story in America, it seems, as Professor Faust has discovered,[9] to have furnished Mrs. Jackson with some hints for her “Ramona” and Charles F. Hoffman with a motif for his “Vigil of Faith.” After his return to Europe Sealsfield published, among other things, “Transatlantische Reiseskizzen” (1833), translated as “Life in the New World, or Sketches of American Society” (1844), which originally appeared in The New York Mirror in 1827–8 and which furnished Simms with some scenes for “Guy Rivers”; “Nathan der Squatter Regulator” (1837), translated as “Life in Texas” (1845); “Der Virey und die Aristokraten, oder Mexiko im Jahre 1812” (1834); “Morton, oder Die grosse Tour” (1835); “Das Cajütenbuch, oder Nationale Charakteristiken” (1841), translated as “The Cabin Book” (1844), which furnished Mayne Reid with the last ten chapters of his “Wild Life” without change; and “Süden und Norden” (1842–3), translated as “North and South, or Scenes and Adventures in Mexico” (1844). In his vigorous delineations of the crude American life of the twenties and thirties, Sealsfield exhibited great enthusiasm, a wide range of observation which overlooked nothing and which measured impartially, and a comprehension of the true inwardness of our young institutions such as no native American of his day possessed. If his exaggerating brush failed of the touch of an artist, he created some characters, such as Morton and Nathan Strong, who deserve immortality as typical Americans, and described with inimitable fidelity “the dauntless squatter and sturdy pioneer, the Southern planter and patriarchal slave-holder, the grasping millionaire and his emissaries, the New York dandy and the society belle, the taciturn Yankee sea-captain and the hot-blooded Kentuckian, the utilitarian alcalde and the reformed desperado.”

William Leggett (1802–39), after spending some time at Georgetown College, accompanied his family in 1819 to make a settlement on the prairies of Illinois. He spent the years 1822–26 as a midshipman in the navy. His experiences of pioneer and sea life were graphically portrayed in “The Rifle,” published in 1828 in The Atlantic Souvenir, and in “Tales by a Country Schoolmaster” (1835). For the remainder of his life he was engaged in journalism, from 1829 till 1836 as one of the editors of The Evening Post.

Southern Novelists.—Thus far we have considered no native Southern writer of fiction. The novel ripened late in the South; indeed, only one writer of fiction of the first rank was produced by the South before the Civil War. Yet in the varied and picturesque life of the aristocratic planters, the frontiersmen, the “poor whites,” and the negroes there were rich materials for the artist and the story-teller, who in due time began to avail themselves of their opportunity. “The Valley of the Shenandoah” (1824) by George Tucker (1775–1861), though reprinted in England and translated into German, possesses slight worth, and little more can be said of his “Voyage to the Moon” (1827), a satirical romance; yet these works gave promise of better things from the South. William A. Carruthers (1806–72), a voluminous contributor to magazines, wrote two novels, “The Cavaliers of Virginia” (1832) and “The Knights of the Horseshoe” (1845), which, in spite of serious defects, deal with colonial days in Virginia in a genial, vigorous, and unhackneyed manner.

“Davy” Crockett (1786–1836), crude, unlettered hunter, backwoodsman, and Congressman, published, in his “Autobiography” (1834), a collection of thrilling narratives of adventure remarkable for directness, vividness, and virility. The “Georgia Scenes, Characters, and Incidents” (1835) of Augustus B. Longstreet (1790–1870), who was for many years a college president, revealed the curious traits of the poor whites or “Crackers” of Georgia. “The Partisan Leader” (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851) dealt with the encroachments of the Federal Government upon the rights of the States, and prophesied with startling and accurate logic the terrible disruption which occurred a quarter of a century later. If artistically imperfect, it is a stirring tale, intense in its action, and of heroic strain. But it can scarcely be said that any of these works now survive. They are mainly important as illustrating the evolution of Southern fiction. With Kennedy and Simms, however, the South takes a high place in the fiction of America.

John Pendleton Kennedy.—For John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870), literature was never more than a pastime, a fact much to be regretted. Kennedy belonged to a prominent and wealthy family. He was born in Baltimore, was graduated from Baltimore College in 1812, and studied law. Entering political life, he employed his pen effectively in the defence of his political principles, but occasionally amused himself with ventures in lighter forms of literature. His first work of importance, “Swallow Barn” (1832), was distinctly declared not to be a novel; and indeed the action is of slight importance. His main purpose in writing it was to give, in connection with a slender plot, a picture of manners and customs in Virginia toward the end of the eighteenth century. Here is no subtle characterisation; the persons of the narrative are drawn broadly and naturally and the story moves easily, if a little slowly, to its end. The local scenery and institutions are delineated with the utmost fidelity. Frank Meriwether, the prosperous country gentleman and magistrate, has been called a Virginia Sir Roger de Coverley; and there is throughout observed the same quiet good humour, the same cheerful atmosphere, the same genial optimism that one finds in the pages of Addison. “Horse-Shoe Robinson, a Tale of the Tory Ascendency” (1835), was a story of early Tory days in South Carolina, and is now generally considered the best novel written in the South before the Civil War. The action centres about the battle of King’s Mountain (1780), which is vividly and accurately described. The intrepid valour of the backwoods patriot, the bitterness and horror of civil war, the relieving and characteristic humour of primitive frontier life, are well portrayed. The blacksmith Galbraith Robinson is a typical American, worthy to rank with Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and possibly truer to nature than Cooper’s more famous creation. In 1838 appeared Kennedy’s third novel, “Rob of the Bowl: a Legend of St. Inigoes,” a story of Colonial Maryland and the struggles of the Catholic settlers, with which are interwoven traditions of the piratical “Brethren of the Coast.” Nor must we fail to mention the humorous chronicle entitled “Quodlibet: Containing some Annals thereof, by Solomon Secondthought, Schoolmaster” (1840), in which are described the vagaries and absurdities of an early Presidential election. Had Kennedy made literature the serious business of life he would have won more lasting fame. As it is, he deserves to be more widely read than he is.[10]

William Gilmore Simms.—One of the most prolific of American novelists was William Gilmore Simms. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, April 17, 1806, he was early left, by the death of his mother and the removal of his father to Tennessee, to the care of his grandmother, from whom he learned many a weird tale of peril and adventure. From the poor schools of his time he gained little, though he became an omnivorous reader. Apprenticed to a druggist, at eighteen he turned to the study of law. A long visit to his father in the South-west gave him a good opportunity to study the primitive life of the backwoodsmen, a life which he afterward described inimitably. At twenty he married and in another year he was admitted to the bar. Successful from the first, he resolutely turned, however, from the practice of law to a literary life. He had become well known as a poet when his first prose tale, “Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal,” appeared in 1833, revealing the influence of William Godwin and Brockden Brown, but also independent skill in the construction of an interesting narrative. In “Guy Rivers” (1834), a description of Georgia in the turbulent days of the gold fever, Simms began a series of border romances which, though marred by a slipshod style and by roughness of construction, are nevertheless in the main readable on account of the rapidity and energy of the narrative. In “The Yemassee” (1835), a story of the strife between South Carolina and the Indians in 1715, Simms is perhaps at his best, and his stirring narrative strongly reminds one of, though it does not rival, the work of Cooper. Then came a trilogy, “The Partisan” (1835), “Mellichampe: a Legend of the Santee” (1836), and “Katharine Walton, or The Rebel of Dorchester” (1851), in which he portrays every phase of social life in Charleston during the Revolutionary War, and delineates the military careers of Marion, Pickens, Moultrie, Sumter, and Hayne. Between 1836 and 1859 he published some twenty-five other novels and stories, generally in two volumes each, the best of which are “The Kinsmen” (1841), afterwards known as “The Scout,” (1854), “The Sword and the Distaff,” now known as “Woodcraft” (1852), “The Forayers, or The Raid of the Dog-Days” (1855), its sequel, “Eutaw” (1856), and “The Cassique of Kiawah” (1859). He also wrote numerous short stories for various periodicals; one of these, “Grayling, or Murder Will Out,” published in The Gift for 1842, was pronounced by Poe the best ghost story he had ever read. A collection of thirteen of Simms’ best stories was published in 1845–46 under the title of “The Wigwam and the Cabin.” Notwithstanding his immense popularity before the Civil War, Simms is now well-nigh forgotten. Although a conscientious workman, he wrote much too rapidly to produce permanent literature, and his faulty style and his excessive fondness for portraying in detail scenes of carnage and crime strongly repel the reader of to-day. After the Civil War, which Simms did much to bring on and from which he suffered severe losses, his popularity rapidly waned, and he tried in vain to make good his losses. He died in his native city on June 11, 1870, having composed this epitaph for himself: “Here lies one who, after a reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labours, has left all his better works undone.”

His remarkable achievement in the pioneer days of American letters, on the whole, entitles him to be remembered with gratitude; and the verdict of Poe, who ranked Simms, as a novelist, just below Cooper and Brockden Brown, has not been impugned.[11]

Edgar Allan Poe.—No American writer is more difficult to judge than Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), whether as a man or as a writer; and perhaps no other writer has received more attention from critics, not only in America but also in Europe. Poe was born in Boston of Southern parents, in the year which saw the birth of Tennyson, Darwin, Gladstone, and Holmes. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was an actress, who died in 1811 of consumption; his father, David Poe, Jr., for a time a strolling player, was a man of little force; tradition represents him as dying young, a victim of consumption and alcoholism. Adopted after his mother’s death by John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, the boy Edgar Poe was wondered at and spoiled by his foster-parents, who were people of means and position. When they went abroad in 1815, Poe was entered at the Manor House School, Stoke Newington, near London; here he remained five years, imbibing the influences of a half-rural scene whose ancient buildings and historical associations have since been swallowed up by the metropolis. From 1820 to 1825 he was at school in Richmond. As a child, Poe was beautiful and clever; as a youth he was superior rather than abnormal. He learned quickly though not accurately; for the inaccuracy his teachers were in part to blame. He was lithe, swift of foot, an excellent swimmer, and, though proud and self-centred, could play the leader among his fellows. By the time he was ready for college, he showed the effects of indulgence on the part of the Allans, being imperious and wilful, unduly sensitive as to his state of orphanage, and squandering his too abundant pocket-money. During his brief residence at the University of Virginia (1826), Poe maintained high scholarship in Latin and French, but lived the life of his companions, drinking (though apparently not to excess) and incurring gambling debts which his guardian repudiated. Set to work in the counting-room of Mr. Allan, the young man rebelled and ran away to Boston, probably under an assumed name, and without capital save a sheaf of immature poems. He soon enlisted as a private in the army, made his peace with his guardian, and was sent to West Point. Here again he proved a clever student; but, purposely neglecting the routine, in 1831 he was discharged.

Obliged henceforth to depend on his own resources, Poe now approached almost to the point of starvation, when by his “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” (1833) he gained a prize of one hundred dollars offered by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, and through John P. Kennedy, whom Poe called “the first true friend I ever had,” obtained temporary relief for his wants and help in getting literary work. He now became a contributor to, and soon the literary editor of, The Southern Literary Messenger. His numerous stories and criticisms did much to make the magazine successful and famous. In 1836 Poe married his beautiful cousin Virginia Clemm, who lacked three months of being fourteen years of age; but family ties could not prevent his morally weak nature from occasional indulgence in drugs and intoxicants, and his irregularities in January, 1837, brought about his dismissal from the editorial chair of the Messenger, for which, however, he continued to write. For a time the Poes now lived in New York, practically supported by Mrs. Clemm, who conducted a boarding-house. Here he completed and published his longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a tale of an Antarctic cruise as far south as the 84th parallel, based on Benjamin Morell’s “Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and Pacific” (1832) with frequent dashes of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” but full of such situations of blood-curdling horror and such highly imaginative landscape-painting as only the genius of Poe could produce. The years 1838–44 Poe spent in Philadelphia. In 1839 he collected and published his “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque.” He wrote constantly for Graham’s Magazine, of which he was editor from 1840 till 1843; critiques, essays, and tales flowed from his pen. In imaginative story-telling, this was the period of his best work. His occasional lapses into intoxication are partly explained by the fits of insanity brought on by anxiety over the precarious condition of his wife, who in 1841 ruptured a blood-vessel while singing and who hovered between life and death for six years. The year 1844 found him back in New York, associated first with N. P. Willis on The Evening Mirror and later with Charles F. Briggs on The Broadway Journal. The publication of “The Raven” in the Mirror (January 29, 1845) and of his “Tales” (1845) greatly increased his reputation; but with curious and fatal perversity he proceeded to make enemies by trying to palm off upon the Boston Lyceum (October 16, 1845) a juvenile poem, “Al Aaraaf,” as a new work and by sharply castigating his literary contemporaries in “The Literati of New York.” The next year he removed his family to Fordham, a suburb of New York. Here his young wife died in 1847, of consumption; and he never really recovered from the shock. He conceived various literary enterprises; but he had become virtually a physical and moral wreck, unable to work except at long intervals. Toward the end of 1848 he proposed marriage to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, a Providence poet, and was accepted; but the match was broken off in consequence of Poe’s drinking to excess. He now determined to go South to lecture and procure funds with which to publish a magazine to be called The Stylus. At Philadelphia he had an attack of delirium tremens. Recovering, he went on to Richmond, where he spent the summer of 1849. He proposed marriage to an old flame, Mrs. Sarah Elmira Shelton, then a widow, who gave him some encouragement. About this time he signed a pledge to abstain from all intoxicating drinks, and made a new start in life. A lecture at the Exchange Hotel brought him some $1500; and with this in his pocket he started for New York to close up some business and take Mrs. Clemm back with him; but stopping in Baltimore en route he was induced to drink some wine, went on a debauch, and a few days later (October 7th) died in a hospital of brain fever. There is ground for believing that he had been drugged by political toughs on election day (October 3d) and carried to various polls to vote for the Whig candidates.

Such was the pathetic and tragic career of one of the most brilliant of American literary men. Few lives have been the subjects of so much controversy. In estimating his character, justice must be tempered with mercy; and this is the easier now that it is seen that, during at least the latter part of his life, his mental condition was abnormal if not pathological.[12] He inherited tendencies which he was unable to control, and with which his environment wholly unfitted him to cope. When sober and sane, he was a quiet, well-bred, and refined gentleman, who could talk fascinatingly and in whom women found “a peculiar and irresistible charm”; he was capable, moreover, of working hard and efficiently. When under the influence of opium or intoxicating liquors, he was a wholly different man, with whom, fortunately, we are not here concerned. With the two exceptions of his wife and mother-in-law, he formed no close and lasting attachments. He was always deeply self-centred and found it impossible to enter sympathetically into the lives, sorrows, and aspirations of others. Thus his sensitive temperament more and more withdrew into itself and found its kindred in the phantasms of his powerful imagination.

Poe’s genius is probably best expressed in his tales. They are not bulky in extent; in the Putnam edition they fill five octavo volumes. Many of them are marred by journalistic looseness and mannerisms—too much use of the parenthesis, the too constant recurrence of favourite words and phrases. Occasionally he misses good opportunities for telling dramatic effects and contrasts; and in general it may be admitted that the element of human passion, “save in its minor chords of sorrow and despair,” is notably absent from his works. A passionate lover himself, his artistic genius was not concerned with the ordinary love-story. His lack of a sense of humour, too, has been remarked. His attempts to be humorous cannot be pronounced successful. Finally, some of his tales, “Arthur Gordon Pym” for example, contain matter so repulsive that the wonder is that any person could endure reading them, much less writing them.

Yet the fact remains that on a large number of these tales is the unmistakable stamp of genius. It may be well to recall the classification of them adopted by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry. We have first the “Romances of Death,” of which the most famous are “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora”; then come the “Old World Romances,” of which “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are probably most read. In the second volume we find three groups, “Tales of Conscience, Natural Beauty, and Pseudo-Science,” the last including his “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Hans Pfaall.” In the third are “Tales of Ratiocination,” including the famous “Gold-Bug,” the harrowing “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the perfect detective story “The Purloined Letter”; and “Tales of Illusion,” including the horrible “Oblong Box.” Then come the “Extravaganzas and Caprices” and lastly the two “Tales of Adventure and Exploration,” namely, “Arthur Gordon Pym” and “Julius Rodman.” It will be evident that Poe achieved success in two markedly distinct classes of tales: those in which a purely intellectual puzzle is worked out, and those in which a definite emotional effect is produced. The “Tales of Ratiocination” were the forerunners of a long line of “detective stories”—by Gaboriau, De Boisgobey, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, and others,—in none of which does one find a keener analytical mind than that of Monsieur Dupin. “The Gold-Bug” undoubtedly suggested to Stevenson some features of “Treasure Island.” Likewise in such stories as “Hans Pfaall,” Poe was the pioneer in compounding flights of imagination with bits of popular science, being followed by Jules Verne and others of his class. Of the tales charged with emotion, the best are probably the three “Romances of Death” mentioned above. In these, it has been said, we see the highest reach of the romantic element in Poe’s genius. The lady Ligeia is pure spirit, without human qualities, the maiden of a dream. The framework of the tale is slight; it is merely a prose-rhapsody on the theme expressed in the words of old Glanvill, “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his own feeble will.” This theme, the supremacy of mind over matter, was one over which Poe busied himself much; but to scientific thought on the subject he contributed little of value. It has been pointed out, however, that Poe was the first to write this sort of tale, the “psychical story,” in which Stevenson and others later outdid him. He was a subtle psychologist of certain moods and qualities, and understood the fiercer passions of terror and remorse as have few other men; of this, “William Wilson” furnishes abundant proof. But his range is limited, and most readers, tired, like the Lady of Shalott, of shadows, soon long to change his world of mystery and madness and death for the real world of sane and kindly, if commonplace, men and women.

According to the old maxim, however, we must take the artist for what he is. Poe chose his material and his setting as his artistic genius guided him; that he made skilful use of this material there can be little doubt. Within his narrow range, he is absolute master. His intensity, his eloquence, his skill in the choice and repetition of words force the reader to yield to the spell and believe for the moment even in the impossible. His limitations have been well set forth by Professor Woodberry:

Being gifted with the dreaming instinct, the myth-making faculty, the allegorising power, and with no other poetic element of high genius, he exercised his art in a region of vague feeling, symbolic ideas, and fantastic imagery, and wrought his spell largely through sensuous effects of colour, sound, and gloom, heightened by lurking but unshaped suggestions of mysterious meanings.

Symbolism is indeed evident throughout his imaginative works; in “The Black Cat,” for example, remorse is indicated by the cat’s flaming eye; in “William Wilson,” a guilty conscience is the man’s double. Of ornamentation there is plenty; Poe revelled in a wealth of beautiful images of Oriental and Gothic splendour.

In some of his tales, Poe reveals a certain kinship with Hawthorne. Both are fond of dwelling in a remote world. Both depict states of the soul; brief experiences; evanescent dreams. But Hawthorne’s is always a moral world; Poe’s, while never immoral, is prevailingly unmoral. In Hawthorne’s tales we are never long forgetful of the Puritan heritage of conscience; Poe’s indifference to moral issues is a not surprising result of his cavalier temperament. Both writers undoubtedly owe something to the weird imagination of Ernst Hoffmann (1776–1822); Poe also continues the literary tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and the “Tales of Terror.” Comparison with these writers suggests two other facts: first, that Poe was not a novelist, but a writer of short stories; he knew little about ordinary life, and nothing of human character, save through study of his own; he preferred a small canvas whereon his picture should be painted with Pre-Raphaelite fidelity and elaborate pains, and was unable or unwilling to undertake a work on the scale of what we now call novels; secondly, that he was always a romancer, with a bias for medievalism as pronounced as if his characters wore armour and his pages were full of tournaments and chivalry.

If Poe has often been without honour in his own country and in England, he has been enthusiastically received on the Continent. In France he early became known through the magnificent translation of Charles Baudelaire, and his influence has never waned.[13] In Spain, Italy, and Germany he continues to be widely read and is generally regarded as the foremost man of letters hitherto produced by America. Time, that relentless and perverse critic, has given him a place of honour among the makers of world-literature, and his fame is secure.

Some Minor Writers.—At the novel-writing contemporaries of Kennedy, Simms, and Poe we can take but a passing glance. James Lawson (1799–1880), a Scotchman who, graduating from the University of Glasgow, came to America in 1815 and engaged in the mercantile and insurance business, is remembered for his “Tales and Sketches by a Cosmopolite” (1830), mainly relating to Scottish domestic life and romance. He was a friend of Edwin Forrest and Gilmore Simms. Richard Penn Smith (1799–1854) was the author of “The Forsaken” (1831), a novel of the American Revolution still worth reading. Henry William Herbert (1807–58), eldest son of the Rev. William Herbert, dean of Manchester, was graduated from the University of Cambridge with distinction in 1829 and in 1830 came to America, engaging in teaching Greek and writing for magazines. In 1834 he published a historical novel, “The Brothers, a Tale of the Fronde,” which he had begun in The American Monthly Magazine; following it up with “Cromwell” (1837), “Marmaduke Wyvil” (1843), and “The Roman Traitor” (1848), a romance founded on the conspiracy of Catiline. He also wrote many tales and sketches of romantic incidents in European history. As a writer on sports, under the name of “Frank Forester,” he became a popular authority, and may be said to have been the first writer who introduced field sports into American fiction.

Robert Montgomery Bird (1805–54), a native of Delaware, began his literary career by writing tragedies; one of these, “The Gladiator,” was frequently played by Edwin Forrest. His first two novels, “Calavar” (1834) and “The Infidel” (1835), were descriptions of life in Mexico during the Spanish conquest; while “Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay” (1837), powerfully portrayed the thirst for vengeance aroused in American backwoodsmen, and thus sharply contrasted the real Indians with the somewhat idealised types in Cooper’s stories. He also wrote “Sheppard Lee” (1836), “The Hawks of Hawk Hollow” (1835), and “The Adventures of Robin Day” (1839), a romantic novel of adventure. Although conscientious, he was not a skillful writer, and his extravagant and exciting tales are no longer read. Theodore Sedgwick Fay (1807–98), a New York lawyer and journalist, was the author of “Norman Leslie” (1835), a somewhat tame and highly moralised picture of life in New York City at the beginning of the century; its poverty of artistic merit excited the wrath of Poe, who helped to consign it to a merciful oblivion. Fay also wrote two novels directed against the practice of duelling: “The Countess Ida” (1840), the scene of which is laid in Europe, and “Hoboken, a Romance of New York” (1843), the action of which takes place in a locality notorious for the duels fought there. In 1835 appeared “Grace Seymour” by Hannah F. Lee (1780–1865), a story for the young, and, like the stories of Fay, with a moral purpose. In “Clinton Bradshaw” (1835), Frederick William Thomas (1811–66) painted with moderate success the social life of New York in the early years of the century. Like Fay, however, Thomas was too easily led from the path of artistic virtue by his desire to improve the minds of his readers. Thomas also wrote “East and West” (1836), in which he ably described a Mississippi steamboat race, and “Howard Pinckney” (1840), a novel of contemporary life in which both plot and character are handled not without skill.

Daniel Pierce Thompson.—The moral and educational improvement of the reader is likewise an evident purpose in the work of Daniel Pierce Thompson (1793–1868), a Vermont jurist, whose “May Martin, or The Money-Digger” appeared in 1835. His most famous work, which is still widely read, was “The Green Mountain Boys, a Romance of the Revolution” (1840), in which are described the early methods of fighting the Indians. Other stories of New England life from his pen were “Locke Amsden, or The Schoolmaster” (1845), in which he evidently drew upon his own experience, “Lucy Hosmer” (1848), “The Rangers, or The Tory’s Daughter” (1851), a story dealing with the Revolutionary campaigns of 1777 in Vermont, “Tales of the Green Mountains” (1852), “Gaut Gurley, or The Trappers of Lake Umbagog” (1857), and “The Doomed Chief” (1860).

Hall, Hildreth, Hoffman.—While Thompson was delineating Vermont life, James Hall (1793–1868) wrote of the then far West. Born in Philadelphia, Hall saw service in the War of 1812, and in 1820 went to Illinois and engaged in law and newspaper work. His “Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West” (1835) and several later volumes of tales are characterised by a natural and easy style, much skill in narrative, and general fidelity to detail. The distinction of writing the first of the army of anti-slavery novels belongs to the historian Richard Hildreth (1807–65). “Archy Moore” (1837) was republished in England, being reviewed by The Spectator and other papers. A rather extravagant narrative, it purports to be the autobiography of a Virginia slave during the War of 1812. A second edition with a continuation was published in 1852 as “The White Slave.” Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–84), after studying at Columbia College and preparing for the bar, practised law for three years in New York, then abandoned it for journalism and literature. He was the founder of The Knickerbocker Magazine, associated later, for many years, with the name of its editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and was connected with various other periodicals. His two novels, “Greyslaer” (1840), founded on the celebrated Beauchamp murder case in Kentucky,—a novel of intense interest which reminds some readers of Cooper,—and “Vanderlyn” (published serially in The American Monthly Magazine in 1837), like his other writings, reflect a generous and refined character. His promising career was cut short in 1849 by insanity.

William Ware.—In March, 1836, there appeared in The Knickerbocker Magazine the first of a series of “Letters from Palmyra,” which aroused much interest. They purported to be written by a young Roman noble who visited Palmyra in the reign of Zenobia. They vividly presented the everyday life of the Roman Empire and at once gave their author high rank as a classical scholar. William Ware (1797–1852) graduated from Harvard College in 1816 and became a Unitarian clergyman; for some years he edited The Christian Examiner. The “Letters from Palmyra” were published in book form in 1837; the book is now called “Zenobia,” from the title of the English reprint. It was followed in 1838 by a sequel, “Probus,” in which the last persecution of Roman Christians is ably and energetically described. The title of this book was afterward changed to “Aurelian.” His third novel, “Julian, or Scenes in Judea” (1841), narrated many episodes in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucifixion forming a powerful climax to the story.

Mathews and Briggs.—A highly imaginative and somewhat absurd romance entitled “Behemoth, a Legend of the Mound-Builders” (1839) was the work of Cornelius Mathews (1817–89), a New York dramatist and magazine writer. His “Career of Puffer Hopkins” (1841) set forth some phases of contemporary political life; it first appeared serially in Arcturus, which Mathews edited in 1840–42. Another novel of his was “Moneypenny, or The Heart of the World” (1850), a story of city and country life. All of Mathews’ stories, however, have a journalistic flavour. In the same year with Mathews, Charles Frederick Briggs (1840–77), a New York journalist, entered the ranks of the novelists with his “Adventures of Harry Franco, a Tale of the Great Panic” (1839), following it with “The Haunted Merchant” (1843) and “The Trippings of Tom Pepper” (1847). All of his novels have a certain value as humorous pictures of New York City life; through them runs a vein of amusing satire. Briggs was later the first editor of Putnam’s Monthly.

Henry W. Longfellow.—It was in 1839 also that Longfellow published his once popular “Hyperion, a Romance,” in which, in connection with a pathetic love story, he mainly sought, in the style of Richter, to convey his romantic impressions of the life and traditions of the Old World. The volume is charged, if not surcharged, with sentiment. Paul Flemming’s enthusiasm for the quaint and picturesque in European lore and scenery takes us back to the days when Continental Europe was for Americans a land of romance, and when visits to the Old World were still not accomplished without difficulty and had not lost their novelty. Of a wholly different texture is the only other prose tale written by Longfellow, “Kavanagh, a Tale,” which appeared in 1849 and which probably suffered by coming so near the romantic and fascinating “Evangeline.” It is a bookish and uneventful story of New England life; Hawthorne said of it, “Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book.” Yet it is written in a characteristically graceful style, and shows that the scholar-poet was a good observer of the life around him, though he could not give that life an air of reality in his portraiture.

John Lothrop Motley.—The fame of Motley’s historical work has obscured the reputation of his fiction. “Morton’s Hope, or The Memoirs of a Provincial” (1839), like “Hyperion,” recalls the interest in German university life which was becoming general in America—a life which Motley vividly describes. From Germany the hero returns to participate in the American Revolution, in which he distinguishes himself. In “Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony” (1849), Motley utilised the story of Thomas Morton, the jolly Royalist who with his followers settled near Boston in 1626 and whose revelry shocked his staid Puritan neighbours. As a historical picture, it has high value. Both of these novels, abounding in carefully wrought descriptions and gleams of genuine humour, deserved greater success than they had.

Caroline M. Kirkland.—A similar service was done for life in Michigan by Caroline M. Kirkland (1801–64), whose humorous and lively descriptions of frontier life, “A New Home; Who’ll Follow?” (1839), “Forest Life” (1842), and “Western Clearings” (1846), were in their day successful and popular. Mrs. Kirkland’s early works were published over the pen-name of “Mrs. Mary Clavers.” Her literary career extended over a quarter of a century, and she was long a popular contributor to magazines and annuals.

The Forties.—The decade of 1840–50 saw the advent of no writers of enduring reputation. “Charles Elwood, or The Infidel Converted” (1840), a kind of philosophical autobiography by Orestes A. Brownson (1803–76), is really an essay in the guise of a novel, and can here only be mentioned. Brownson was successively a Presbyterian, a Universalist, a Unitarian, and a Roman Catholic; as a thinker, he might be called a Christian Socialist. Epes Sargent (1813–80), a student at Harvard College, who became a journalist and a popular dramatist, was the author of several juveniles, two of which, “Wealth and Worth” (1840) and “What’s to be Done?” (1841), had a large sale; and of two now forgotten novels, “Fleetwood, or The Stain of Birth” (1845) and “Peculiar, a Tale of the Great Transition” (1864), a story of changes in the South in the Civil War. Washington Allston’s “Monaldi” (1841), an Italian romance with an Othello-like motif, really belongs to an earlier generation, having been written as early as 1821, and intended apparently for publication in Dana’s Idle Man. It is a powerful but harrowing story in which the progress of jealousy is traced throughout its course. Maria J. McIntosh (1803–78), losing her fortune in the panic of 1837, adopted authorship as a means of support and wrote a number of juveniles, the first of which was “Blind Alice” (1841), and all of which were intended to illustrate the moral sentiments. Some of her stories were reprinted in London; and she continued to write for more than twenty years. Maria Brooks (1795–1845), a once highly praised but now forgotten poet, in 1843 privately printed a prose romance, “Idomen, or The Vale of Yumuri,” which was really an autobiography, including much poetical description and reflection.

Sylvester Judd.—The most successful picture of old New England life ever written, down to the time of its publication (1845), was “Margaret, a Tale of the Real and Ideal.” It was this book which Lowell, in his “Fable for Critics,” spoke of as

the first Yankee book
With the soul of Down East in ’t, and things farther East,
As far as the threshold of morning, at least,
Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true,
Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new.

The author, Sylvester Judd (1813–53), was a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Yale College, who had become a Unitarian clergyman and settled in Augusta, Maine; and his purpose in writing was “to promote the cause of liberal Christianity.” Had he kept this purpose more in the background, his place among the greater novelists would have been sure; for he had observed closely every phase of Puritan life and possessed rare gifts of realistic and dramatic story-telling. Not only does he correctly describe the externals of New England places and people, down to the niceties of dialect; but he also interprets with rare and poetic insight the moral and spiritual conflicts into which his characters are drawn. Another novel similar to “Margaret,” “Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family,” appeared in 1850; it deals with the career of a New England country youth. Like Margaret, the hero has altogether too many “experiences”—introduced in order to point the moral. Yet on the whole the realism of these novels is wholesome and fresh and true.

Herman Melville.—A follower of Cooper—though at some distance in point of quality—in writing stories of the sea, was Herman Melville (1819–91). A native of New York, he spent the greater part of the years 1837–44 in voyages to the Pacific. Of his observations and exciting experiences he made good use in a long series of tales, the first of which, “Typee” (1846), narrated his adventures in the Marquesas. The general perception of the growing importance of the Pacific doubtless aided in securing for Melville’s stories the most favourable reception, both in America and in England. “Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas” (1847) continued the earlier story, with no less vivid pictures of sailor life, fights with savages, and thrilling escapes. His next story, “Mardi, and a Voyage Thither” (1849), was an attempt at a philosophical romance contrasting European civilisation and Polynesian savagery, and, though it contained some able descriptions, its vagaries and lack of sobriety doomed it to failure. “Redburn, His First Voyage” (1849) tells of a journey to England, and includes some realistic horrors; it could hardly be popular. “The White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War” (1850) is a photographic narrative of experiences on board a United States frigate. Melville’s masterpiece was “Moby Dick, or The Whale” (1851); though an uneven work of excessive length, written partly in a strained, Carlylesque style, it nevertheless fills the reader with the fascination of the sea. The fierce contest of Captain Ahab with the great whale, which “becomes a representative of moral evil in the world,” is not unworthy of the pen of a greater writer. Melville never afterward came up to the standard of this work, though he wrote several other stories and novels, among them “Pierre, or The Ambiguities” (1852), “Israel Potter” (1855), narrating the adventures of a Revolutionary soldier, and praised by Hawthorne for its portraits of Paul Jones and Benjamin Franklin, “The Piazza Tales” (1856), and “The Confidence Man” (1857).

Mrs. Judson and Others.—Mrs. Emily Chubbuck Judson (1817–54), third wife of the celebrated Baptist missionary Dr. Adoniram Judson, and best known by her pen name of “Fanny Forester,” in her “Alderbrook” (1846), a collection of village sketches, described girl life in New England, winning a reputation which lasted for many years. Peter Hamilton Myers (1812–78), a Brooklyn lawyer, was for a brief time remembered for his historical romances, “The First of the Knickerbockers, a Tale of 1673” (1848), “The Young Patroon, or Christmas in 1690” (1849), “The King of the Hurons” (1849), and “The Prisoner of the Border, a Tale of 1838” (1857). Charles Wilkins Webber (1819–56), the son of a Kentucky physician, inherited from his mother a fondness for out-of-door life, and spent some years in Texas. Then he tried in succession medicine, theology, and authorship. His stories and descriptions of South-western life and adventure include “Old Hicks the Guide” (1848), “The Hunter Naturalist” (1851–53), illustrated by his wife, “Tales of the Southern Border” (1852), and “Shot in the Eye” (1853), his best story. He died in the battle of Rivas, in Central America.

Mayo, Kimball, and Wise.—William Starbuck Mayo (1812–95), a New York physician, travelled in the Barbary States, and on returning home wrote two popular novels, “Kaloolah, or Journeyings in the Djebel Kumri” (1849) and “The Berber, or The Mountaineer of the Atlas” (1850). The former purports to be the autobiography of Jonathan Romer, who, after numerous exciting adventures in the American woods, goes to Africa, has various hair’s-breadth escapes, fights with slave-traders and natives, and marries a beautiful dusky princess. In its satirical remarks on civilised usages it imitates “Gulliver.” “The Berber,” a story of more regular construction, is still enjoyable. It recounts events supposed to take place in Africa at the close of the seventeenth century, and like its predecessor contains minutely accurate descriptions of tropical scenery and animal life. Richard B. Kimball’s “St. Leger, or The Threads of Life” (1849), reprinted from The Knickerbocker, was a serious attempt to depict a mind in pursuit of truth in a story in which romantic adventure plays some part; but the characters are not strongly marked. Henry Augustus Wise (1819–69), son of a naval officer and himself a lieutenant in the Navy, saw the humorous and comic side of the seaman’s life, and chronicled his impressions in “Los Gringos, or An Inside View of Mexico and California” (1849), and still more successfully in his sprightly and sentimental “Tales for the Marines” (1855), in which all sorts of marvellous and amusing things happen.

The Decade of 1850–60.—It can hardly be said that the next decade, 1850–60, saw any great improvement in the quality of our fiction; but there is evident an increasing preference for realistic studies of home life, and a growing indifference to the highly wrought and more or less melodramatic romances which had delighted the readers of an earlier day. For many reasons, Americans desired to see themselves in fiction, doing their daily work, struggling with everyday temptations, yielding or conquering according to their native strength or weakness. There was a growing sense of the artistic—and moral or didactic—value of common life. The reaction against romance was inevitable, and was no doubt accelerated by the coming of railroads, telegraphs, Atlantic cables, and the controversy over slavery.

Ik Marvel.—Significant, then, was the popularity, which has scarcely waned, of “Ik Marvel’s” two books, “Reveries of a Bachelor” (1850) and “Dream Life” (1851). The author, Donald G. Mitchell (born in 1822), was a product of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, whose experience had been enriched by European travel. The pernicious influence of Carlyle upon Mitchell’s style is too evident; but the sentiment, or sentimentality, the enthusiasm, the tender pathos of these slight stories have appealed to thousands. In his “Dr. Johns” (1866), Mitchell brought the stern Calvinistic theology of New England into relief by contrasting it with French frivolity.

Edward Everett Hale.—Edward Everett Hale’s literary activity has extended over something like sixty years. Born in Boston in 1822, and graduated from Harvard at seventeen, he became a journalist, story-teller, minister, historian, and antiquarian. His “Margaret Percival in America,” a religious novel, appeared in 1850, and he has since written others, “If, Yes, and Perhaps” (1868), “Ten Times One Is Ten” (1870), “In His Name” (1874), a truthful and glowing narrative of the Waldenses, “Philip Nolan’s Friends” (1876), the gallant hero of which, the Kentuckian Philip Nolan, was “the protomartyr to Mexican treachery,” “The Fortunes of Rachel” (1884), a slight but clever tale, and “East and West” (1892). But Dr. Hale is best known in literature by his short stories. “My Double and How He Undid Me,” published in The Atlantic for September, 1859, was a clever and amusing piece which made a great hit and immortalised some of the bores of his parish. “The Man Without a Country” (The Atlantic, December, 1863) brought its author national reputation and has become a classic. It has been justly pronounced “the best sermon on patriotism ever written.” Speaking of sermons recalls the criticism often applied to Dr. Hale’s stories, that the moral is too obvious; in general, however, the moral cannot be called obtrusive and hardly interferes with the general effect of the story.

Alice Cary.—Alice Cary (1822–71), better known as a poet, wrote pleasantly appreciative sketches of her Ohio home under the title of “Clovernook, or Recollections of our Neighbourhood in the West” (1852); a second series of similar sketches was published in 1853. Her three novels, “Hagar” (1852), “Married, not Mated” (1856), and “The Bishop’s Son” (1857), were characterised by power of observation and by careful literary workmanship.

The Warners.—Susan Warner (1819–1885), whose earlier work was done under the pen name of “Elizabeth Wetherell,” became well known through the publication (1850) of her first book “The Wide, Wide World.” This was a story of domestic life on the upper Hudson, which showed an exceptional power of description and of character study, and which secured very promptly wide acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic. With the single exception of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” it proved to be the most popular novel written up to that date in America, and it had the compliment of reproduction in a long series of unauthorised editions in Europe. “The Wide, Wide World” was followed by a series of stories, of which the most important were “Queechy” (1852), “The Hills of the Shatemuc” (1858), “Diana” (1859), “Wych Hazel” (1860), and “The Gold of Chickaree” (1861). She collaborated with her sister, Anna Bartlett Warner (born in 1820), in the production of “Dollars and Cents,” which was issued in 1853, and in some successful books for the young, “Mr. Rutherford’s Children,” etc.

Harriet Beecher Stowe.—A diligent and painstaking writer of fiction for thirty years, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) is to-day remembered only as the author of a single book, and that one almost her first. The daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher of Connecticut, she was born into a remarkably gifted family and inherited the best that New England Puritan culture could give. At twenty-one she was married to Professor Calvin E. Stowe, then a teacher in the divinity school in Cincinnati. Here she had an opportunity of studying the workings of slavery, and as a result entered heart and soul into the anti-slavery movement. In the year in which Hawthorne published his “House of the Seven Gables,” Longfellow “The Golden Legend,” and Melville “Moby Dick,” she began in The National Era a serial which aroused wide and bitter discussion. The next year (1852), “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared in book form. Over three hundred thousand copies, according to the author, were sold within a year. The part played by the book in hastening the “irrepressible conflict” of the Civil War cannot be estimated. It is not hard to see blemishes in the story: tame description, careless and loose construction, the tone of the preacher; but these are rendered insignificant by the great merits of the book, its frequent touches of humour, its range and variety of characters, who are not merely types but are graphically individualised, its broad humanity, its fierce earnestness, its kindling emotion. These may not suffice to put the story among the great and enduring works of literature; but it will be long before America outgrows her fondness and admiration for it. Mrs. Stowe followed this book in 1856 with “Dred” (republished in 1866 as “Nina Gordon”), in which she continued to depict effectively the position of slavery with reference to the church and the law, and the defeat by mob violence of a high-minded slave-owner who sought to purify the unholy system. A more deliberate and carefully planned work than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” it has generally been considered as inferior in power, though Harriet Martineau thought it superior. Old Tiff is one of the great creations of negro character. As a picture, in the main true, of old-fashioned Southern life, it has a lasting charm. In “The Minister’s Wooing” (1859), Mrs. Stowe turned to New England life at the beginning of the century, and dealt with the influence of the older Calvinism upon devout and sensitive minds. In artistic construction and effect it has been pronounced superior to all her other works; some of the characters, for example, Mary Scudder and Dr. Hopkins, are notably strong and impressive. Yet, like all her later works, it has been overshadowed by that one which was struck out in a white heat of passionate appeal. “The Pearl of Orr’s Island” (1861) is a quiet story of Puritan life on the Maine coast, insufficiently relieved by a few thrilling episodes. In “Agnes of Sorrento” (1862), the result of a visit to Europe, Mrs. Stowe turned to Italy in the days of Savonarola, but achieved even less success than George Eliot did in the next year with “Romola.” In 1863, the Stowes settled permanently at Hartford, Connecticut; and after the war they acquired a winter residence in Florida. The best of Mrs. Stowe’s numerous later books is probably “Oldtown Folks” (1869), dealing with life in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, about the year 1800, and portraying some very realistic characters. Such stories as “Pink and White Tyranny” (1871), “My Wife and I” (1871), and “We and Our Neighbours” (1875), in which she aimed to reform fashionable society, though successful in respect to sales, were from an artistic point of view decided failures. In “Sam Lawson’s Fireside Stories” (1871) and “Poganuc People” (1878), she returned to New England Yankees and the life she most successfully drew. On the whole it must be said that her reputation, while it lasts, will rest chiefly upon “Uncle Tom” and the New England stories.

John T. Trowbridge.—One of the most popular of writers for boys is John Townsend Trowbridge (born in 1827). Educated in the common schools, he learned Latin, Greek, and French by himself, taught school, worked a year on an Illinois farm, and then settled down to writing in New York City. Some of his books are “Father Brighthopes” (1853), “Burrcliff” (1853), “Martin Merrivale” (1854), “Neighbour Jackwood” (1857), a famous anti-slavery novel, perhaps a good second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in influence and popularity, “Cudjo’s Cave” (1864), and “Coupon Bonds, and Other Stories” (1871). He has been a prolific writer of healthful and finished stories for boys. John Burroughs has well said of him: “He knows the heart of a boy and the heart of a man, and has laid them both open in his books.”

John Esten Cooke.—A romancer of the old school was John Esten Cooke (1830–86), a younger brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke. A native of Virginia, he found inspiration in the romantic history of that State, drawing many of his characters from life. His first important publication was “Leather Stocking and Silk, or Hunter John Myers and His Times” (1854); his best story proved to be “The Virginia Comedians, or Old Days in the Old Dominion” (1854), which deals with the period just preceding the Revolution, and which, with its youthful enthusiasm and interesting descriptions of colonial manners, has been called by some critics the best novel written in the South down to the Civil War. After serving in the Confederate army, Cooke sought to utilise his military experiences in several dramatic stories; but his reputation had been made, and his day had gone by.

Maria S. Cummins.—In “The Lamplighter” (1854), Maria S. Cummins (1827–66) achieved a success comparable to that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ben Hur.” In “Mabel Vaughan” (1857) she produced probably a better book. Both of her stories, however, while in the main true delineations of girl and home life, are too evidently written with a didactic aim, and are at times laboured and diffuse. Her other stories, “El Fureidis” (1860), a story of Palestine, and “Haunted Hearts” (1864), are now entirely forgotten.

Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens.—Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens (1813–86) was in the fifties and sixties an immensely popular novelist. She was the daughter of John Winterbotham, an English woollen manufacturer who had come to America, and was born at Humphreysville, Connecticut. In 1831, she married Edward Stephens, a publisher, and began in 1835 to edit The Portland Magazine, founded by her husband. Later, she edited The Ladies’ Companion and became an associate editor of Graham’s and Peterson’s, to which she contributed over twenty serials. Her first elaborate novel, “Fashion and Famine” (1854), had a very large circulation and was three times translated into French. A novel of affected intensity, it contained some excellent delineation of character. Among her other works were “Zana, or The Heiress of Clare Hall” (1854), republished as “The Heiress of Greenhurst,” “The Old Homestead” (1855), “Sibyl Chase” (1862), “The Rejected Wife” (1863), “Married in Haste” (1870), “The Reigning Belle” (1872), and “Norton’s Rest” (1877). She was attentive to details and wrote in a condensed and forcible style.