 Part 2, Chapter 1 of a Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kalinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 2, Preface and Chapter 1. Preface. This little volume is intended as a companion to the outline sketch of English literature, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. Writing it, I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of a primer or elementary manual. I have not undertaken to describe or even to mention every American author or book of importance, but only those which seem to me of most significance. Nevertheless, I believe that the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a guidebook to our literature. Though meant to be mainly a history of American bell-letra, it makes some mention of historical and political writings, but hardly any, of philosophical, scientific and technical works. A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different chapters, I have named a few of the most important authorities in American literary history, such as Dukink, Tyler, Stedman, and Richardson. Henry A. Beers. Outline sketch of American literature, Chapter 1. The Colonial Period. 1607 to 1765. The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books that they wrote. Those stern men with empires in their brains had more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers, indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting conditions—the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna of a new world, things which seemed stimulating to the imagination, and incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which upon the whole would hardly rise into the region of literature. New England, said Hawthorne, was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present. But to a contemporary, that old New England of the 17th century doubtless seemed anything but picturesque, filled with grim, hard, worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly threatened by Indian wars and troubled by quarrels among themselves and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal governors in the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion and the theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records, are petty and wearisome to read of. At least they would be so. Did we not bear in mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts were slowly educating the little communities which had hardly as yet secured a foothold on the edge of the raw continent? Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing and commerce was building up large towns and there were wealth and generous living in fine society, the good old colony days when we lived under the king had yielded little in the way of literature that is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the relation of a colony to the mother country which dooms the thought and art of the former to a hopeless provincialism. Canada and Australia are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the 13 colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the outward appliances of an advanced civilization, and yet what have Canada and Australia contributed to British literature? American literature had no infancy, that engaging naivete and that heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs of Europe, find of course no counterpart on our soil. Instead of emerging from the twilight of the past, the first American writings were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial literature. The poets in particular, instead of finding a challenge to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother country. America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607, nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise, Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal acquaintance of the great dramatist. They have acted my fatal tragedies on the stage, wrote Smith. Many circumstances in the Tempest were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the sea-venture on the still-vexed Bermouths, described by William Strachey in his true repertory of the rack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at Jamestown and published at London in 1510. Shakespeare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polly Albion, addressed a spirited, valedictory ode to the three shiploads of brave, heroic minds who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature. And as there plenty grows of laurel everywhere, Apollo's sacred tree, you it may see a poet's brows to crown that may sing there. Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of The Civil Wars, had also prophesied in a similar strain, and who in time knows whether we may vent the treasurer of our tongue to what strange shores, what worlds in the yet-unformed oxidant may come refined with accents that are ours. It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, but Walter Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was one of the original promoters of the Virginia Colony, and he made voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guyana. And more unlikely things have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632, he should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane the Younger, who was afterward Milton's friend, who was fifteen years but in sage-council-old, came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts. These are idle speculations, and yet when we reflect that Oliver Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, let our frail thoughts daily with false surmise, and fancy by how narrow a chance Paradise Lost missed being written in Boston. But as a rule, the members of the literary guide left to emigrate. They liked the feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society which America has only begun to reach during the present century. Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the two great distributing centres of the English race. The men who colonized the country between the capes of Virginia were not drawn to any large extent from the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first settlers were gentlemen. For the good of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, of good means and great parentage. Such was, for example, George Percy, a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the original adventures and the author of A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia, which contains a graphic narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But many of these gentlemen were idlers, unruly gallants packed thither by their friends to escape ill destinies, dissipated younger sons, soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the off-scourings of the London streets. Fruit of press gangs and jail deliveries sent over to work in the plantations. Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates, which had waterfronts on the rivers of that flow into the Chesapeake. There, the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the plantations. Surrounded by his slaves and visited occasionally by a distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and careless life. He was fond of fox hunting, horse racing, and cock fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the burgesses. The courthouse was the nucleus of social and political life in Virginia as the town meeting was in New England. In such a state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education did not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the colony from 1641 to 1677, said in 1670, I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. In the matter of printing, this pious wish was well nigh realized. The first press set up in the colony about 1681 was soon suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From that date until some ten years before the Revolution, one printing press answered the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. The earliest newspaper in the colony was the Virginia Gazette, established in 1736. In the absence of schools, the higher education naturally languished. Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to England and entered the universities. But these were few in number, and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of Massachusetts. The College of William and Mary was established at Williamsburg, chiefly by the exertions of the Reverend James Blair, a Scotch divine who was sent by the Bishop of London as commissary to the church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693 and held its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called Cavaliers of Virginia that while the former founded and supported Harvard College in 1636 and Yale in 1701 of their own motion and at their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from the crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by attacks of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In return for this royal grant, the college was to present yearly to the king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their plantation manners with them and were accustomed to keep race horses of the college and bet at the billiard or other gaming tables. William and Mary College did a good work for the colony and educated some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary Era, but it has never been a large or flourishing institution and has held no such relation to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the foundation of the University of Virginia in which Jefferson took a conspicuous part, southern youths were commonly sent north for their education and at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War there was a large contingent of southern students in several northern colleges notably in Princeton and Yale. Naturally the first books written in America were descriptions of the country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English public and the encouragement of further immigration. Among books of this kind produced in Virginia, the earliest and most noteworthy were the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith. The first of these was his true relation, namely, of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that colony, printed at London in 1608. Among Smith's other books, the most important is perhaps his General History of Virginia, London 1624, a compilation of various narratives by different hands but passing under his name. Smith was a man of restless and daring spirit full of resource, impatient of contradiction, and of a somewhat venglorious nature with an appetite for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the longbow. He had seen service in many parts of the world and his wonderful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His truthfulness in essentials has not perhaps been successfully impugned but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with which he has colored them and, in particular, the charming story of Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own. The one romance of early Virginia history has passed into the realm of legend. Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but forcible personality which they unconsciously display. They are the rough hewn records of a busy man of action and his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in Virginia and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sanders who came to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyatt in 1621 and completed his excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James in the midst of the Indian Massacre of 1622. Limbed as he writes by that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and repose having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of muses. Sanders went back to England for good probably as early as 1625 and can therefore no more be reckoned as the first American poet on the strength of his paraphrase of the metamorphoses than he can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he introduced the first water mill into America. The literature of colonial Virginia and of the southern colonies which took their point of departure from Virginia is almost wholly of this historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with the internal affairs of the province such as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 one of the most striking episodes in our anti-revolutionary annals and of which there exist a number of narratives some of them anonymous and only rescued from manuscript condition a hundred years after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations of new territory such for the Westover manuscripts left by Colonel William Byrd who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina and gave an account of his survey in his History of the Dividing Line which was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of colonial Virginia and a type of the old Virginia gentlemen. He had been sent to England for his education where he was admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, elected a fellow of the Royal Society and formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrary. He held many offices in the government of the colony and founded the cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large and at Westover where he had one of the finest private libraries in America he exercised a baronial hospitality blending the usual profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a scholar and picked man of countries. Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in literature. His History of the Dividing Line is written with a jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor and which gives to the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of A Progress to the Minds and A Journey to the Land of Eden in North Carolina. The first formal historian of Virginia was a native and inhabitant of the place whose history of Virginia was printed at London in 1705. Beverly was a rich planter and a large slave owner who, being in London in 1703 was shown by his bookseller the manuscript of a forthcoming work Old Mixons, British Empire in America. Beverly was set upon writing his history of the inaccuracies in this and likewise because the province has been so misrepresented to the common people of England and make them believe that the servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow and that the country turns all people black. An impression which lingers still in parts of Europe. The most original portions of the book are those in which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and animals of the new world and particularly in the account of the Indians to which his third book is devoted and which is accompanied by valuable plates. Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at first hand and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting. The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed and impartial but much less readable work was William Stith's History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, 1747 which brought the subject down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman and at one time a professor in William and Mary College. The Virginians were stanched royalists and churchmen. The Church of England was established by law and nonconformity was persecuted in various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by the Puritans of New England. Two from Braintree, Massachusetts and one from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach but many resorted to them in private houses until being finally driven out by fines and imprisonments they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy were not as a body very much of a force in educational literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed condition of their parishes lived as domestic chaplains with the wealthier planters and partook of their illiteracy and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whittaker, the Apostle of Virginia who came over in 1611 to preach to the colonists and convert the Indians good news from Virginia in 1613 three years before his death by drowning in James River. The conditions were much more favorable for the production of the literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and genial existence of the Old Dominion had no counterpart among the settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay and the Puritans must have been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect for learning and the food which sustained them through the hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw materials of literature they have at least been fortunate in finding interpreters among their descendants and no modern Virginian has done for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and romance over the lives of the founders of New England. Cotton Mather in his Magnalia quotes the following passage from one of those election sermons delivered before the General Court of Massachusetts which formed for many years the great annual intellectual event of the colony. The question was often put unto our predecessors what went ye out into the wilderness to see and the answer to it is not only too excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. We came hither because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full dispensations of the Gospel defended by rulers that should be of ourselves. The New England colonies were in fact theocracies. Their leaders were clergymen or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no Whitt inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and state were one. The Freemans' oath was only administered to church members and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or dissenters. The Pilgrim Fathers regarded their transplantation to the New World as an exile and nothing is more touching in their written records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the old home which they had left and even toward that church of England from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and the wilderness. This howling wilderness these ends of the earth these goings down of the sun are some of the epithets which they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they had come to stay and unlike Smith and Percy and Sandus the early historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently with the new settlements. A few indeed went back after 1640. Mather says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first classes or immigration were among them when the victory of the Puritanic Party and Parliament opened a career for them in England and made their presence there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters for example who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain and was beheaded after the restoration went back in 1641 and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts and author of a quaint book against toleration entitled The Simple Cobbler of Agawam written in America and published shortly after its authors arrival in England. The Civil War too put a stop to further immigration from England until after the restoration in 1660. The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men in the middle class, artisans and husband men the most useful members of a new colony but their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities and especially at Emanuel College, Cambridge the Great Puritan College. Their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of education and substance like the elder Winthrop who was learned in the law and Theophilus Eaton first governor of New Haven who was a London merchant of good estate. This computed that there were in New England during the first generation as many university graduates as in any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of 50 families was required by law to maintain a common school and every town of 100 families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636 only 16 years after the landing of the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock Harvard College was founded at Newtown and the name was there upon change to Cambridge. The general court held at Boston on September 8th, 1680 having already advanced 400 pounds by way of essay toward the building of something to begin a college. A university says Mather which hath been to these plantations for the good literature there cultivated Saal Gentium and a river without the streams whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the devil. By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot Yale College at New Haven. The settlers of New Haven and Connecticut plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their own doors. A printing press was set up at Cambridge in 1639 which was under the oversight of the university authorities and afterwards of licensors appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in Massachusetts than in Virginia and that liberty of unlicensed printing had pleaded in his Areopagitica in 1644 was unknown in Puritan New England until some 20 years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The Freeman's Oath and an Almanac were issued from the Cambridge Press in 1639 and in 1640 the first English book printed in America a collection of the Psalms in Mather made by various ministers and known as the Bay Psalm Book. The poetry of this version was worse if possible than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering. But it is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted apostle to the Indians the Reverend John Eliot who in 1661 to 1663 translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled a lifetime for the conversion of those salvages, taunies, devil worshipers for whom our early writers have usually nothing but bad words. They have been destroyed and converted. But his so-entitled Mamuse Wunitupana Tamwe Up Bibloom God Naniswe Nukone Testament Ka-wong Wusku Testament the first Bible printed in America remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great value to students of the Indian languages. A modern writer has said that to one looking back on the history of old New England it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there and the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and Winthrop's journals or Mathers Wonders of the Invisible World an impression of gloom of night and cold of mysterious fears besieging the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe between the groaning forest and the shore. The Indian terror hung over New England for more than half a century or until the issue of King Philip's war in 1676 relieved the colonists of any danger of a general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New English Eden free from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque outcrops of the movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these refugees for conscience's sake were compelled in turn to persecute antinomians separatists, familists, libertines, antipedobaptists and later Quakers and still later enthusiasts who swarmed into their precincts and troubled the churches with prophesies and novel opinions. Some of these were banished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a few were put to death. Of the exiles the most worthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous warm-hearted man who was so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil magistrate in cases of conscience or who in other words maintained the modern doctrine of the separation of church and state. Williams was driven away from the Massachusetts colony where he had been minister of the church at Salem and with a few followers fled into the southern wilderness and settled at Providence. There and in the neighboring plantation for which he obtained a charter he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological subjects, the most important of his writings being perhaps his Bloody Tenant of Persecution 1644 and a supplement to the same called out by a reply to the former work from the pan of Mr. John Cotton minister of the first church at Boston entitled The Bloody Tenant Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb. Williams was also a friend to the Indians, whose lands he thought should not be taken from them without payment and he anticipated Eliot by writing in 1643 a key into the language of America. Although it odds with the theology of Massachusetts Bay Williams remained in correspondence with Winthrop and others in Boston by whom he was highly esteemed. He visited England in 1643 and 1652 and made the acquaintance of John Milton. Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the purity of the gospel in their churches the colonists were haunted by superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that Satan angered by the setting up of the kingdom of saints in America had come down in great wrath and was present among them sometimes even in invisible shape to terrify and tempt. Special providences and unusual phenomena like earthquakes, mirages and the northern lights are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson the celebrated leader of the family having according to rumor been delivered of a monstrous birth the Reverend John Cotton in open assembly at Boston upon a lecture day thereupon gathered that it might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness. There will be an unusual range of the devil among us wrote Mather little before the second coming of our lord. The evening wolves will be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world. This belief culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692 that spectral puppet play which beginning with the malicious pranks of a few children who accuse certain uncanny old women and other persons of mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character and resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little black man who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which he carried a sort of muster role of those who had foresworn God's service for the devils. Others testified to having been present at meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without contempt the evidence which grave justices and learned divines considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that time all over the civilized world and that sporadic cases of witch burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Brown in his religio Medici, 1635 affirmed his belief in witches and pronounced those who doubted of them a sort of atheist. But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those who lament the decay of faith would remember what things were done in New England in the name of faith less than 200 years ago. It is not wonderful that to the Massachusetts Puritans of the 17th century the mysterious forest held no beautiful suggestion. To them it was simply a grim and hideous wilderness whose dark aisles were the ambush prowling savages and the rendezvous of those other devil worshipers who celebrated there a kind of vulgar vulporous night. The most important of original sources from the history of the settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford first governor of Plymouth and John Winthrop the second governor of Massachusetts which hold a place corresponding to the writings of Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony but are much more sober and trustworthy. Bradford's history of Plymouth and the documentation covers the period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later analysts but remained unpublished as a whole until 1855 having been lost during the war of the revolution and recovered long afterward in England. Winthrop's journal or History of New England begun on shipboard in 1630 and extending to 1649 was not published entire until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's and perhaps on the whole the more important of the two as the colony of Massachusetts Bay whose history it narrates greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and population though not in priority of settlement. The interest of Winthrop's journal lies in the events that it records rather than in any charm of the historians manner of recording them. His style is pragmatic and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial to the modern mind though instructive as to our forefathers way of thinking. For instance of the year 1632 At Watertown there was in the view of diverse witnesses a great combat between a mouse and a snake and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston Mr. Wilson a very sincere holy man hearing of it gave this interpretation that the snake was the devil the mouse was a poor contemptible people which God had brought hither come Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom. The reader of Winthrop's journal comes everywhere upon hints which the imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of many of Longfellow's New England tragedies of Hawthorne's Maypole of Marymount of Endicott's Red Cross and of Whittier's John Underhill and the Familist's Hymn are all to be found in some dry brief entry of the old Puritan Diarist. Robert Cole having been oft punished for drunkenness was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year to Whitt the year 1633 and thereby gave occasion to the greatest American romance the Scarlet Letter. The famous apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven Harbour upon the top of the poop a man standing with one hand a Kimbo under his left side and in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea was first chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full grown myth some forty years later as related with many embellishments by Reverend James Pierpont of New Haven in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in special providences and among other instances narrates not without a certain grim satisfaction how the Mary Rose a ship of Bristol of about two hundred tons lying before Charleston was blown in pieces with her own powder being twenty-one barrels wherein the judgment of God appeared for the master and company were many of them profane scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here. Without any effort at a dramatic portraiture of character sketching Winthrop managed in all simplicity and by the plain relation of facts to leave a clear impression of many of the prominent figures in the first Massachusetts immigration In particular there gradually arises from the entries in his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John Underhill celebrated in Whittier's poem He was one of the professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan Fathers such as John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War and Miles Standish whose courtship Longfellow sang He had seen service in the low countries and in pleading the privilege of his profession he insisted much upon the liberty which all states do allow to military officers for free speech, etc and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to count Nassau Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of trouble both by his scandalous living and his heresies in religion Having been seduced into familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson who was banished for her beliefs he was had up before the general court and questioned, among other points as to his own report of the manner of his conversion He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way for years and could get no assurance till at length as he was taking a pipe of tobacco the spirit set home an absolute promise of free grace with such assurance and joy as he had never since doubted of his good estate neither should he though he should fall into sin The Lord's Day following he made a speech in the assembly showing that as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use of the creature called tobacco The gallant captain being banished the colony but took himself to the falls of the Piscataquac Exeter, New Hampshire where the Reverend John Wheelwright another adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson had gathered a congregation Being made governor of this plantation Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates breathing reproaches and implications of vengeance but meanwhile it was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced the wife of a cooper and the captain was forced to make public confession which he did with great unction and in a manner highly dramatic He came in his worst clothes being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness without a band in a foul linen cap and pulled close to his eyes and standing upon a form he did with many deep sighs lay open his wicked course There is a lurking humor in the grave Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings Winthrop's own personality comes out well in his journal He was a born leader of men a conditor in Perry just, moderate, patient, wise and his narrative gives upon the whole a favorable impression of the general prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their dealings with one another with the Indians Considering our forefathers errant and calling into this wilderness it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and tracts in controversial theology Multitudes of these were written and published by the divines of the first generation such as John Cotton Thomas Shepard John Norton Peter Bulkley and Thomas Hooker the founder of Hartford of whom it was finally said that when he was doing his master's business nor were their successors in the second or the third generation any less industrious and prolific they rest from their labors and their works to follow them Their sermons and theological treatises are not literature they are for the most part dry, heavy and dogmatic but they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness and an earnestness which sometimes rises into eloquence The pulpit ruled New England and the sermon was the greatest spiritual engine of the time The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion the other world was all their art The daily secular events of life the aspects of nature the vicissitudes of the seasons were important enough to find record in print only insofar as they manifested God's dealings with his people So much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom of serious-minded laymen in his books Franklin, in his autobiography describes this as the constant habit of his grandfather Peter Folger and Mather, in his life of the elder Winthrop says that though he wrote not after the preacher yet such was his attention and such his retention in hearing that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had heard in the congregation These discourses were commonly of great length twice or sometimes thrice converted while the orator pursued his theme even unto Enthly The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy which developed later into Dr. Holmes' Brahmin cast of New England His maternal grandfather was John Cotton His father was Increase Mather the most learned divine of his generation in New England Minister of the North Church of Boston President of Harvard College and author, Interalia of that characteristically Puritan book an essay for the recording of illustrious providences Cotton Mather himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence He was graduated from Harvard at fifteen He ordered his daily life in conversation by a system of minute observances He was a bookworm whose life was spent between his library and his published works numbered upward of three hundred and eighty Of these the most important is the Magnalia 1702 an ecclesiastical history of New England from 1620 to 1698 divided into seven parts One, antiquities Two, lives of the governors Three, lives of sixty famous divines Four, a history of Harvard College with biographies of its eminent graduates Five, acts and monuments of the faith Six, wonderful projects of faith Six, wonderful providences Seven, the wars of the Lord That is, an account of the afflictions and disturbances of the churches and the conflicts with the Indians The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's Worthies of England and Church History with that of Wood's Athene Oxoneensis and Fox's Book of Martyrs Mathers prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers used He was younger by a generation than Striden, but as literary fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother country that nimble English which Striden and the Restoration Essieists introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manor Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown, Filler and Burton a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions conceits, anecdotes and quotations from the Greek and the Latin A page of the Magnalia is almost as richly modeled with italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy and the quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite, Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic subtitles of his books and chapters He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having angled many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven anagramatizes Mrs. Hutchinson's surname into the none such and having occasion to speak of Mr. Urian Oaks's election to the presidency of Harvard College enlarges upon the circumstance as follows we all know that Britain knew nothing more famous than their ancient sect of Druids the philosophers whose order they say was instituted by one Samothes which is in English as much to say an heavenly man the Celtic name Deru for an oak was that from whence they received their denomination as at this very day the Welch called this tree Dru and this order of men Derwiden and there are no small antiquaries who derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the oaks of Mamre which the patriarch Abraham had as well a dwelling as an altar that oaken plain and the eminent oak under which Abraham lodged was extant in the days of Constantine as Isidore, Jerome and Sosamen have assured us yea there are shrewd probabilities that Noah himself had lived in this very oak plain before him for this very place we call Oye which was the name of Noah so styled from the Ogyon Subsoneritus Panibus Sacrifices which he did use to offer in this renowned grove and it was from this example that the ancients and particularly that the Druids of the nations chose oaken retirement for their studies Reader let us now upon another account behold the students of harvard college who have happy Druids under the influences of so rare a president but alas our joy must be short lived for on july 25th 1681 the stroke of a sudden death felled the tree qui tantum inter caput extulit omnis quantum lenta solent inter viberna si presi Mr. Oaks thus being transplanted into the better world the Presidentship was immediately tendered unto Mr. Increase Mather this will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry which disfigured Mather's writing in its substance the book is a perfect thesaurus and in as much as nothing is unimportant in the history of the beginnings of a nation such as this is and is destined to be the magnolia will always remain a valuable and interesting work Cotton Mather born in 1663 was of the second generation of Americans his grandfather being of the immigration but his father a native of Dorchester Massachusetts a comparison of his writings and of the writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford Winthrop Hooker and others of the original colonists shows that the simple and heroic faith of the pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal rigidity the leaders of the puritan exodus not withstanding their intolerance of errors in belief were comparatively broad-minded men they were sharers in a great national movement and they came over when their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its coming triumph at home about the restoration in 1660 the currents of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant member of the body politic and thought in America became more provincial the English to centers though socially at a disadvantage as compared with the church of England had the great benefit of living at the center of national life and a feeling about them the pressure of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did in New England for many generations the dominant sect had things all its own way a condition of things which is not healthy for any sector party hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very much like so many puritan bishops jealous of their prerogatives magnifying their apostolate and careful to maintain their authority over the lady Mather had an appetite for the marvelous and took a leading part in the witchcraft trials of which he gave an account in his wonders of the invisible world 1693 to the quaint pages of the magnolia our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of romances or fairy tales Whittier for example took from thence the subject of his poem the garrison of Cape Anne and Hawthorne embodied in grandfather's chair the most elaborate of Mather's biographies this was the life of Sir William Phipps who from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata reeds less like sober fact than like some ancient fable with talk of the Spanish Maine bullion and plate and jewels and pieces of eight of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewell chief justice of Massachusetts a singularly gracious and venerable figure who was intimately known through his diary kept from 1673 to 1729 this has been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pipps which it resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its self-revelation but to which it is as much inferior in historic interest as the petty province here was inferior in political and social importance to Britain far away for the most part it is a chronicle of small beer the diarist jotting down the minutia of his domestic life and private affairs even to the recording of such haps as this March 23rd I had my haircut by G. Barrett but it also affords instructive glimpses of public events such as King Philip's War, the Quaker Troubles the English Revolution of 1688 etc it bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of the 17th century as Bradford's and Winthrop's colonels bear to that of the first generation Sewell was one of the justices who presided at the trial of the Salem witches but for the part which he took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible by open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the church Sewell was one of the first writers against African slavery in his brief tract The Selling of Joseph printed at Boston in 1700 his phenomena Quedame Apocalyptica a mystical interpretation of prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem which he identifies with America is remembered only because Whittier in his prophecy of Samuel Sewell has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers of poetry indeed or in fact of pure literature in the narrower sense that is of the imaginative representation of life there was little or none in the colonial period there were no novels no plays no satires and until the example of the spectator had begun to work on this side of the water no experiments even at the liner forms of essay writing character sketches and literary criticism there was a verse of a certain kind but the most generous stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called poetry many of the early divines of New England relieved their pens in the intervals of sermon writing of epigrams elegies eulogistic verses and similar grave trifles distinguished Whitt of the so-called metaphysical poets whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England the manner of Dunn and Cowley and those darlings of the New English Muse the emblems of quarrels and the divine week of Dubartas as translated by Sylvester the magnalia contains a number of these things in Latin and English and is itself well bolstered with complimentary introductions in meter by the author's friends for example Anogram while thus the dead in thy rare pages rise, thine with thyself thou dost immortalize to view the odds thy learned lives invite Twix diluthurian and Edomite but all succeeding ages shall despair a fitting monument for thee to rare thy own rich pen, peace silly momus peace hath given them a lasting writ of ease the epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits the death of the Reverend Samuel Stone of Hartford afforded an opportunity of this sort not to be missed and his Thranadist accordingly celebrated him as a whetstone, a lodestone, and ebonyzer a stone for kingly David's use so fit as would not fail Goliath's front to hit etc. the most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, 1662 a kind of doggerel inferno which went through nine editions and was the solace, says Lowell, of every fireside the flicker of the pine knots by which it was conned, perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion Wigglesworth had not this technical equipment of a poet, his verses sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his gloomy poem, which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants of the easiest room in hell, a limbus infantum which even origin need not have scrupled at. The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758 a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton Mass afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College. By virtue of his inquiry into the freedom of the will, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was composed to justify on philosophical grounds the Calvinistic doctrines of foreordination and election by grace, though its arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific necessitarians whose conclusions are as far as sunder from Edwards as from the center thrice to the utmost pole. His writings belonged to a theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a spiritual motivation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelled rather upon the terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of predestination, original sin, total depravity and eternal punishment. The titles of his sermons are significant. Men, naturally God's enemies, wrath upon the wicked to the uttermost, eternal judgment, etc. A natural man, he wrote in the first of these discourses, has a heart like the heart of a devil. The heart of a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold corp is of vital heat. Perhaps the most famous of Edwards' sermons was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8th, 1741, at a time of great awakenings, and upon the ominous text, their foot shall slide in due time. The God that holds you over the pit of hell runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You hang by a slender thread with the divine wrath flashing about it. If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case that he will only tread you underfoot. He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garment so as to stain all his raiment. But Edwards was a rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of God, and there are some passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his treatise concerning religious affections, 1746, such as his portrait of Sarah Pierpont, a young lady in New Haven, who afterward became his wife, and who will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her. Edwards printed works number thirty-six titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in 1829 by his great-grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from Edwards' notebooks quoted by his editor and biographer exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a school boy and a college student, he had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and as might have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton and Locke, or between Fuller and Dryden. The learned digressions, the witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of Latin have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of the modern minister. In Edwards' English, all is simple, precise, direct, and business-like. Benjamin Franklin, 1706 to 1790, who was strictly contemporary with Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents the spirituality and other worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he illustrates the development of the New England Englishmen into the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind with the sagacity and openness of resource of the self-made businessman. He was representative also of his age and age of Aufklärung, éclaircissement, or clearing up. By the middle of the 18th century, a change had taken place in American society. Trade had increased between the different colonies. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were considerable towns. Democratic feeling was spreading. Over 40 newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the revolution. More attention than formerly and theology less. With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston setting type on his brother's New England Corinth, the fourth American newspaper, he got hold of an odd volume of the spectator and formed his style upon Addison whose manner he afterward imitated his busy body papers in the Philadelphia Weekly Mercury. He also read Locke and the English Deistical Writers Collins and Shaftesbury and became himself a deist and free thinker. And subsequently when practicing his trade in London in 1724 to 26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees at a pale alehouse in Cheepside called The Horns where the famous free thinker presided over a club of wits and boon companions. Though a native of Boston Franklin is identified with Philadelphia whether he arrived in 1723 a runaway Prentice boy whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. The description in his autobiography of his walking up market street munching a loaf of bread and passing his future wife, standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the anecdote about Whittington and his cat. It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest as an originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list of his public services is almost endless. He organized the Philadelphia fire department and street cleaning services and the colonial postal system which grew into the United States post office department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania and the first American magazine the general magazine and historical Chronicle so that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the Pennsylvania colony could boast of. In 1754 when commissioners from the colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan which was adopted for the union of all the colonies under one government. But all these things as well as his mission to England in 1757 on behalf of the Pennsylvania assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries, his share in the Declaration of Independence of which he was one of the signers of the United States. The history of American science belonged to the political history of the country. To the history of American science belonged his celebrated experiments in electricity and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman Turgot. Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved as few Americans sense him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly idolized and when he died, Mirobo announced, the genius which has freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to the bosom of the divinity. Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a writer too he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His were strictly literary performances such as his essays after the spectator hardly rise above mediocrity and are neither better nor worse than other imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter baggattels there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which have won them in during favor. Such are his famous stories of the whistle, his dialogue between Franklin and the gout, his letters to Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled Paper. The greater portion of his writings consist of papers on general politics, commerce, and political economy, contributions to the public questions of the day. These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature and many of them were published in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the medium through which for many years he most strongly influenced American opinion. The most popular of his writings were his autobiography and poor Richard's Almanac. The former of these was begun in 1721, resumed in 1788, but never completed. It has remained the most widely current book in our colonial literature. Poor Richard's Almanac begun in 1732 and continued for about 25 years, had an annual circulation of 10,000 copies. It was filled with proverbial sayings in prose and verse inculcating the virtues of industry, honesty, and frugality. Some of these were original with Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression. Poor Richard's saws were such as these, little strokes, fell-grade oaks, three removes are as bad as a fire, early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today. What maintains one vice would bring up two children. It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright. Now and then there were truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin and Saint-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes as an example of his occasional finer moods, the saying Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfitted. They are like fire and flame that cannot be painted. But the sage who invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities and general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage of his autobiography. Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. End of Part 2 Chapter 1 Recording by Kalinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 6, 2009 Part 2, Chapter 2 of a Brief History of English and American Literature This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kalinda A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers Part 2, Chapter 2 The Revolutionary Period From 1765 to 1815 It will be convenient to treat the 50 years which elapsed between the meeting at New York in 1765 of a Congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp Act and the close of the Second War with England in 1815 as, for literary purposes, a single period. This half-century was the formative era of the American nation. Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years of construction. But the men who led the movement for independence were also in great part the same who guided in shaping the constitution of the New Republic and the intellectual impress of the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as distinctly political as that of the colonial era, in New England at least, was theological. And literature must still continue to borrow its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want still, Belletta, was not born in America until the 19th century was well underway. It is true that the revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction, but these were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all and are not to be compared with the contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their importance for us today is rather antiquarian than literary, though the most noteworthy mentioned in due course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under consideration, but literary epics overlap one another at the edges and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter. Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that preceded and accompanied the revolutionary movement were the speeches of political orators like Samuel Adams, and Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome, and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and congresses of revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished naturally. The age moreover was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical age, and the influence of Johnson's oratun prose of the declamatory letters of Junius and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the Elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early congresses. The fame of a great orator like that of a great actor is largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is sought, but the fact that this end is often very and occasional rather than universal and permanent explains why so few speeches are really literature. If this is true even where the words of an orator are preserved exactly as they were spoken it is doubly true when we have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported so that posterity can judge of them only at second hand. Patrick Henry has fared better many of his orations being preserved in substance if not in letter in words biography. Of these the most famous was the defiant speech in the convention of delegates March 28, 1775 throwing down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school boys and many of them remain as familiar as household words. There is one lamp by which my feet are guided and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the prices of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God I know not what course others may take but as for me give me liberty or give me death. The eloquence of Patrick Henry is fervid rather than weighty or rich. But if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their words are said to have produced upon their fellow countrymen we should remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard. The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them vitality when first pronounced. The living presence and voice of the speaker the listening senate the grave excitement of the hour and the silence of the public the wordiness and exaggeration the highly Latinized diction the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of 4th of July addresses have since turned into platitudes all these coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed the earnestness of their speech were effective enough in the crisis and for the purpose to which they were addressed. The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the platform and patriots just Adams constantly for the newspapers essays and letters on the public questions of the time signed Vindex Hyperion Independent Brutus Cassius and the like and couched in language which to the taste of today seems rather over rhetorical. Among the most important of these political essays were the circular letter to each colonial legislature published by Adams and Otis in 1768 Quincy's Observations on the Boston Port Bill in 1774 and Otis's Writes of the British Colonies a pamphlet of 120 pages printed in 1764 No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made the life of Quincy published by his own son preserves for posterity his journals and correspondence his newspaper essays and his speeches at the bar taken from the Massachusetts law reports Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the American people are such state documents as the Declaration of Independence the Constitution of the United States and the messages, inaugural addresses and other writings of our early presidents Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States and the father of the Democratic Party was the author of the Declaration of Independence whose opening sentences have become common places in the memory of all readers One sentence in particular has been as a chivaleth or war cry of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness Not so familiar to modern readers is the following which an English historian of our literature calls the most eloquent clause of that great document and the most interesting suppressed passage in the American literature Jefferson was a southerner but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on the subject of slavery and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for promoting the peculiar institution was left out from the final draft of the Declaration in deference to southern members He has waged cruel war against human nature itself violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him captivating and carrying them into slavery or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither This piratical warfare the Approbrium of Infidel Powers is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them and thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other southern statesmen afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by the men of Jefferson's generation Another famous Virginian John Randolph of Roanoke himself a slaveholder in his speech on the militia bill in the House of Representatives December 10th, 1811 said I speak from facts when I say that the night bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom This was said apropos of the danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a war with England a war which actually broke out in the year following but was not attended with the slave rising which Randolph predicted Randolph was a thoroughgoing states rights man and though opposed to slavery on principle he cried hands off to any interference by the general government with the domestic institutions of the states His speeches read better than most of his contemporaries They're interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional oratory whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at arm's length Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his inaugural address of March 4th, 1801 with its program of equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion religious or political peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none the support of the state governments in all their rights, absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority the supremacy of the civil over the military authority economy in the public expense freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected During his six years residence in France as American minister Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French democracy his main service and that of his party the democratic or as it was then called the republican party to the young republic was in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint Jefferson has some claims to rank as an author in general literature educated at William and Mary college in the old Virginia capital Williamsburg he became the founder of the university of Virginia in which he made special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon and in which the liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed in theory at least the university idea his notes on Virginia are not without literary quality and one description in particular has been often quoted the passage of the Potomac through the blue ridge in which is this poetically imaginative touch the mountain being cloven asunder she presents to your eye through the cleft a small catch of smooth blue horizon at an infinite distance in the plain country inviting you as it were from the riot and tumult roaring around to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below after the conclusion of peace with England in 1783 political discussion centered about the constitution which in 1788 took the place of the looser articles of confederation adopted in 1778 the constitution as finally ratified was a compromise between two parties the federalists who wanted a strong central government and the anti-federals afterward called republicans or democrats who wished to preserve state sovereignty the debates on the adoption of the constitution both in the general convention of the states which met at Philadelphia in 1787 and in the separate state conventions called to ratify its action form a valuable body of comment and illustration upon the instrument itself one of the most notable of the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the Virginia convention that this is a consolidated government he said is demonstrably clear and the danger of such a government is to my mind very striking the leader of the federal party was Alexander Hamilton the ableist constructive intellect among the statesmen of our revolutionary era of whom Talleyrand said that he had never known his equal whom Gizot clasped with the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government worthy of its name and mission Hamilton's speech on the expediency of adopting the federal constitution delivered in the convention of New York June 24th 1788 was a masterly statement of the necessity and advantages of the union but the most complete exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the federal party was the series of 85 papers entitled the federalist printed during the years 1787 to 88 and mostly in the independent journal of New York over the signature of Julius Fablius these were the work of Hamilton of John Jay afterward chief justice and of James Madison afterward president of the United States the federalist papers though written in a somewhat ponderous diction are among the great landmarks of American history and were in themselves a political education to the generation that read them Hamilton was a brilliant and versatile figure a persuasive orator a forcible writer and as secretary of most of American financiers he was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr at Hoboken in 1804 the federalists were victorious and under the provisions of the new constitution George Washington was inaugurated first president of the United States on March 4th 1789 Washington's writings have been collected by Jared Sparks they consist of journals, letters messages, addresses and public documents for the most part plain and business-like manner and without any literary pretensions the most elaborate and the best known of them is his farewell address issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796 in the composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton and Jay it is wise and substance and dignified though somewhat stilted in expression the correspondence of John Adams second president of the United States and his diary kept from 1755 to 85 should also be mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period in the long life and death struggle of Great Britain against the French Republic and its successor Napoleon Bonaparte the federalist party in this country naturally sympathized with England and the Jeffersonian democracy with France the federalists who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom inherited from English precedent were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings on their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism by a singular reversal of the natural order of things the strength of the federalist party was in New England which was socially democratic while the strength of the Jeffersonians was in the south whose social structure owing to the system of slavery was intensely aristocratic the war of 1812 with England was so unpopular in New England by reason of the injury which it threatened to inflict on its commerce that the Hartford Convention of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the secession of New England from the Union a good deal of oratory was called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain negotiated by Jay in 1795 by the alien and sedition law of 1798 and by other pieces of federalist legislation from the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800 the best of the federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames of Massachusetts and the best of his orations was perhaps his speech on the British treaty in the House of Representatives April 18th 1796 the speech was in great measure a protest against American chauvinism and the violation of international obligations it has been said the world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea if where there are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a sand bank for sea monsters to fatten on space for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict what is patriotism is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are greener I see no exception to the respect that is paid among nations so the law of good faith by barbarians a whiff of tobacco smoke or a string of beads gives not merely binding force but sanctity to treaties even in Algiers a truce may be bought for money but when ratified even Algiers is too wise or too just to disown and annull its obligation Ames was a scholar and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful more literary in a way than those of his contemporaries his eologiums on Washington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes rather excessive perhaps in laudation and in classical illusions in all the oratory of the revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg address that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain a prominent figure during and after the war of revolution was Thomas Paine or as he was somewhat disrespectfully called Tom Paine he was a dissenting minister who conceiving himself ill-treated by the British government came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause his pamphlet Common Sense issued in 1776 began with the famous words these are the times that try men's souls this was followed by the crisis a series of political essays advocating independence and the establishment of a republic published in periodical form though at irregular intervals Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great service to the American patriots his writings were popular and his arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people addressing themselves to the Common Sense the prejudices and passions of unlettered readers he afterward went to France and took an active part in the popular movement there crossing swords with Burke in his rights of man 1791-92 written in defense of the French Revolution he was one of the two foreigners who sat in the convention but falling under suspicion during the days of the terror he was committed to the prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre July 27th 1794 while in prison he wrote a portion of his best known work The Age of Reason this appeared in two parts in 1794 and 1795 the manuscript of the first part having been entrusted to Joel Barlow the American poet who wrote this when Payne was sent to prison The Age of Reason damaged Payne's reputation in America where the name of Tom Payne became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a synonym for atheism and blasphemy his book was denounced from a hundred pulpits and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight of the young whose religious beliefs it might undermine it was in effect a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument against Christianity what the cutting logic and perciflage the sourriere idue of Voltaire had done in France Payne with coarser materials assayed to do for the English speaking populations deism was in the air of the time Franklin Jefferson Ethan Allen Joel Barlow and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly deistic free thought somehow went along with democratic opinions and was a part of the liberal movement of the age Payne was a man without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling he was no scholar and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched in his examination of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an imposition and a forgery full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities supernatural Christianity with all its mysteries and miracles was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people and churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants this way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most advanced thinkers the contest between skepticism and revelation has long since shifted to other grounds both the philosophy and the temper of the age of reason belong to the 18th century but Payne's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd half-educated doubters and in America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand many a rural tavern or store where the village atheists wrestled in debate with the deacon or the schoolmaster Payne rested his argument against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles the falsity of prophecy the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old Testament worthies the disagreement of the evangelists in their gospels, etc the spirit of his book and his competence as a critic are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament any person who could tell a story of an apparition or of a man's walking could have made such books for the story is most wretchedly told the sum total of a person's learning is A, B, Ab and Hic-Hec-Huck and this is more than sufficient to have enabled them had they lived at the time to have written all the books of the New Testament when we turn from the political and controversial writings of the revolution to such lighter literature as existed we find little that would deserve mention in a more crowded period the few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the current of the time Rari Nantes in Goigite Vasto attract attention rather by reason of their fewness than of any special excellence that they have during the 18th century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes of caste in the Old Country the so-called classical or Augustine writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style the spectator set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose from Franklin's busy body down to the time of Irving who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later than any English writer the influence of Locke of Dr. Johnson and of the Parliamentary Orators had us already been mentioned in poetry the example of Pope was dominant so that we find for example William Livingston who became Governor of New Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress in 1747 a poem on philosophic solitude which reproduces the trick of Pope's antithesis and climaxes with the imagery of the rape of the Locke and the didactic morality of the imitations from Horace and the moral essays let ardent heroes seek renown in arms pant after fame and rush to war's alarms to shining palaces let fools resort and dunces cringe to be esteemed at court mine be the pleasure of a rural life from noise remote and ignorant of strife far from the painted bell and white-gloved bow the lawless masquerade and midnight show from ladies' lapdogs, courteers, garters, stars, phops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars the most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's McFingal published in part at Philadelphia in 1775 and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782 it went through more than 30 editions in America and several times reprinted in England McFingal was a satire in Fort Cantos, directed against the American loyalists and modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, Huda Brass As Butler's hero sallies forth to put down may games and bear baitings so the Tory McFingal goes out against the Liberty Poles and bonfires of the Patriots but is tarred and feathered and otherwise ill-intreated and finally takes refuge in the camp the poem is written with smartness and vivacity attains often to drullery and sometimes to genuine humor it remains one of the best of American political satires and unquestionably the most successful of the many imitations of Huda Brass whose manner it follows so closely that some of its lines which have passed into currency as proverbs are generally attributed to Butler, for example No man air felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law or this for any man with half an eye what stands before him may spy but optics sharp it needs Iween to see what is not to be seen Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted flag of the confederation inscribed with inconsistent types of liberty and thirteen stripes Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati who made much noise in their time with the Hartford wits the other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins David Humphries, Joel Barlow Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight and Richard Alsup Trumbull, Humphries and Barlow had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight during the war they served in the army in various capacities and at its close they found themselves again together for a few years at Hartford a club that met weekly for social and literary purposes their presence lent a sort of ecla to the little provincial capital and their writings made it for a time an intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New York The Hartford wits were staunch federalists and used their pens freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams and in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats In 1786-87 Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow and Humphries published in the New Haven Gazette a series of satirical papers entitled the Anarchiad suggested by the English Roliad and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic on the restoration of chaos and substantial night These papers were an effort to correct by ridicule the anarchic condition of things which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789 It was a time of great confusion and discontent when in parts of the country democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of 5 years pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American Army The Anarchiad was followed by the Echo and the Political Greenhouse written mostly by Alsup and Theodore Dwight and similar in character in tendency to the earlier series Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires but they were influential in their day and are an important part of the literature of the old federalist party Humphries became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service and was successfully ambassador to Portugal and to Spain once he introduced into America the breed of merino sheep He had been on Washington's staff during the war and was several times an inmate of his house at Mount Vernon where he produced in 1785 the best known of his writings, Mount Vernon an ode of a rather mild description which once had admirers Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in contemporary letters After leaving Hartford in 1788 he went to France where he resided for 17 years made a fortune in speculations and became imbued with French principles writing a song in praise of the guillotine which gave great scandal to his old friends at home In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine residence near Washington which he called Calorama Barlow's literary fame in his own generation rested upon his prodigious epic The Columbiaad The first form of this was The Vision of Columbus published at Hartford in 1787 This he afterward recast and enlarged into the Columbiaad issued in Philadelphia in 1807 and dedicated to Robert Fulton the inventor of the steamboat This was by far the most sumptuous piece of bookmaking that had then been published in America and was embellished with plates executed by the best London engravers The Columbiaad was a grandiose performance and has been the theme of much ridicule for later writers Hawthorne suggested it's being dramatized and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning and E.P. Whipple declared that no critic in the last 50 years has read more than 100 lines of it In its ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the age which was patriotically determined to create by tour de force a national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American nature and the destinies of the Republic America was bigger than Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the Iliad Accordingly Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a hill of vision where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the history of America or as our Bards then preferred to call it Columbia He shows in the conquest of Mexico by Cortez the rise and fall of the kingdoms of the Incas in Peru the settlements of the English colonies in North America the old French and Indian wars the revolution ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the newborn nation the machinery of the vision was borrowed from the 11th and 12th books of Paradise Lost Barlow's verse was the ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope and his poetic style was distinguished by the vague glittering imagery and the false sublimity which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets though Barlow was but a masquerader and true heroic he showed himself a true poet in mock heroic his hasty pudding written in Savoy in 1793 and dedicated to Mrs. Washington was thoroughly American in subject at least and its humor though over-elaborate is good one couplet in particular has prevailed against oblivion Aene in thy native regions how I blushed to hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush another Connecticut poet one of the seven who were fondly named the playeds of Connecticut was Timothy Dwight whose conquest of Canaan shortly after his graduation from college but not published until 1785 was like the Columbia an experiment toward the domestication of the epic muse in America it was written like Barlow's poem in rhymed couplets and the patriotic impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduction of our revolutionary war by way of episode among the wars of Israel Greenfield Hill 1794 was an idyllic and moralizing poem descriptive of a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor it is not quite without merit shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thompson and Beatty but as a whole is tedious and tame Byron was amused that there should have been an American poet christened Timothy and it is to be feared that amusement would have been the chief emotion kindled in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chance to see the stern dedication to himself of the same poets Triumph of Infidelity 1788 much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able theology explained and defended 1794 a re-statement with modifications of the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards which was accepted by the congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of the orthodoxy of the time his travels in New England and New York including descriptions of Niagara the White Mountains Lake George the Catskills and other passages of natural scenery not so familiar then as now was published posthumously in 1821 was praised by the Sothe and is still readable as president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817 Dwight by his learning and ability his sympathy with young men and the force and dignity of his character exerted a great influence in the community the strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced a number of ballads serious in comic, wig and tori dealing with the battles and other incidents of the long war enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or were hawked about in printed broadsides most of these have no literary merit and are now mere antiquarian curiosities a favorite piece on the tori side was the cow chase a cleverish parody on chevy chase written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre and at the expense of mad Anthony Wayne the national song Yankee Doodle was evolved during the revolution and as is the case with John Brown's body and many other popular melodies some obscurity hangs about its origin the air was an old one and the words of the chorus seemed to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song and applied in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as early as 1755 like many another nickname the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own the stanza Yankee Doodle came to town etc. anti-dates the war but the first complete set of words to the tomb was the Yankee's return from camp which is apparently of the year 1775 the most popular humorous ballad on the wigside was the battle of the kegs founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at Philadelphia this was written by Francis Hopkinson a Philadelphian and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence Hopkinson has some title rank as one of the earliest American humorists without the keen wit of McFingal some of his messillaneous essays and occasional writings published in 1792 have more genealogy and hardiness than Trumbull satire his letter on whitewashing is a bit of domestic humor that foretokens the Danbury Newsman and his modern learning 1784 a burlesque on college examinations in which a salt box is described from the point of view of metaphysics logic natural philosophy mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry long kept its place in school readers and other collections his son Joseph Hopkinson wrote the song of Hail Columbia which is saved from insignificance only by the music to which it was married the then popular air of the President's March the words were written in 1798 on the eve of a threatened war with France and at a time when party spirit ran high it was sung nightly by crowds in the streets and it was seasoned by a favorite singer of the theater for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in Puritanic Boston much better than Hail Columbia was the Star-Spangled Banner the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key a Marylander during the bombardment of the British of Fort McHenry near Baltimore in 1812 more pretentious than these was the one celebrated ode of Robert Treet Payne Jr. Adams and Liberty the anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society the sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750 but it is notwithstanding a very wooden performance Payne was a young Harvard graduate who had married an actress playing at the old Federal Street Theater the first playhouse opened in Boston in 1794 his name was originally Thomas but this was changed for him by the Massachusetts legislature because he did not wish to be confounded with the author of The Age of Reason Dim are those names arsed while in battle loud and many an old revolutionary worthy who fought for liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten or consigned to the limbo of Duke King's Cyclopedia and Griswold's Poets of America here and there a line has by accident survived to do duty as a motto or inscription while all its context is buried in oblivion few have read anything more of Jonathan M. Sewell's for example than the couplet no pent-up Utica contracts your powers but the whole boundless continent is yours taken from his epilogue to Cato written in 1778 another revolutionary poet was Philip Forneau that rascal Forneau as Washington called him when annoyed by the attacks upon his administration in Forneau's National Gazette he was of Huguenot descent was a classmate of Madison at Princeton College was taken prisoner by the British during the war and when the war was over engaged in journalism as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the Democrats Forneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet by virtue of his wild honeysuckle Indian burying ground Indian student and a few other little pieces which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited perhaps with his French blood indeed to speak strictly all of the poets hitherto mentioned were nothing but rimers but in Forneau we meet with something of beauty and artistic feeling something which still keeps his verses fresh in his treatment of Indian themes in particular appear for the first time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character and wild life of the red man and that pensive sentiment which the fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of their retreating footsteps in this Forneau anticipates Cooper and Longfellow though his work is slight compared with the leather stocking tails or Hiawatha at the time when the Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over 3 millions Philadelphia had 30,000 inhabitants and the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the seaboard the Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers and Forneau fetches his Indian student not from the outskirts of the settlement but from the remote backwoods of the state from Susquehanna's farthest springs where savage tribes pursue their game his blanket tied with yellow strings a shepherd of the forest came Campbell lifted in his poem O'Connor's Child the last line of the following stanza from Forneau's Indian burying ground By midnight moons or moistening dews investments for the chase arrayed the hunter still the deer pursues the hunter and the deer a shade and Walter Scott did Forneau the honor to borrow in Marmian the line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Utah Springs they saw their injured country's woe the flaming town the wasted field then rushed to meet the insulting foe they took the spear but left the shield Scott inquired of an American gentleman who wished him the authorship of this poem which he had by heart and pronounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in the language the American drama and American prose fiction had their beginnings during the period now under review a company of English players came to this country in 1752 and made the tour of many of the principal towns the first play acted here by professionals on a public stage was The Merchant of Venice which was given by the English company at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1752 the first regular theater building was at Annapolis, Maryland where in the same year this troop performed among other pieces Farquhar's Bose Stratagem in 1753 a theater was built in New York and won in 1759 in Philadelphia the Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the acting of plays and in the latter city the players were several times arrested during the performances under a Massachusetts law forbidding dramatic performances at Newport Rhode Island on the other hand which was a health resort for planters from the southern states and the West Indies and the largest slave market in the North the actors were hospitably received the first play known to have been written by an American was The Prince of Parthia, 1765 a closet drama by Thomas Godfrey of Philadelphia the first play by an American writer acted by professionals in a public theater was Royal Tyler's Contrast performed in New York in 1786 the former of these was very high tragedy and the latter very low comedy and neither of them is otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of indifferent dramas there is in fact no American dramatic literature worth speaking of not a single American play of even the second rank unless we accept a few graceful parlor comedies like Mr. Howell's Elevator and Sleeping Car Royal Tyler the author of Contrast cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and a journalist and eventually became chief justice of Vermont his comedy The George's Speck 1797 had a great run in Boston and his Algerine captive published in the same year was one of the earliest American novels it was a rambling tale of adventure constructed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war between the United States and Algiers in 1815 Charles Brockton Brown the first American novelist of any note was also the first professional man of letters in this country who supported himself entirely by his pen he was born in Philadelphia in 1771 lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city where he started in 1803 the literary magazine and American register during the years 1798 to 1801 he published in rapid succession six romances Wheeland, Ormond, Arthur Mervin Edgar Huntley, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot Brown was an invalid in something of a recluse with a relish for the ghastly an incident and the morbid in character he was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's and almost infinitely so to Hawthorne's his books belong more properly to the contemporary school of fiction in England which preceded the Waverly novels to the class that includes Bechford's Vathic, Godwin's Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein and such gothic romances as Lewis's Monk Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolfo a distinguishing characteristic of this whole school is what we may call the clumsy horrible Brown's romances are not wanting an inventive power in occasional situations that are intensely thrilling and in subtle analysis of character but they are fatally defective in art the narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind interspersed with the author's reflections the wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character are in startling contrast with the old fashion preciseness of the language the conversations when there are any being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an elegant female the following is a sample description of one of Brown's heroines and is taken from his novel of Ormond the leading character in which a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish wickedness is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr Helen Ecleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality her features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching all those graces of symmetry smoothness and luster which assemble in the imagination of the painter heralds from the bosom of her natal deep the paffeine divinity blended their perfections in the shade complexion and hair of this lady but alas Helen's intellectual deficiencies could not be concealed she was proficient in the elements of no science the doctrine of lines and surfaces was as disproportionate with her intellect as with those of the mockbird she had not reasoned on the principles of human action nor examined the structure of society she could not commune in their native dialect with the sages of Roman Athens the constitution of nature the attributes of its author the arrangement of the parts of the external universe and the substance, modes of operation and ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and insoluble by her Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis ludicrously weak thus the hero of his first novel Weeland, whose father anticipates old crook in Dickens' Bleak House by dying of spontaneous combustion is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and children and the voices turn out to be produced by the ventriloquism of one carwin the villain of the story similarly in Edgar Huntley the plot turns upon the phenomena of sleepwalking Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his romances in his own country and the only passages in them which have now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in Edgar Huntley his graphic account in Arthur Mervin of the Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 Shelley was an admirer of Brown and his experiments in prose fiction such as Zestrosi and St. Irvin the Rosicrucian are of the same abnormal and speculative type another book which falls within this period was the journal 1774 of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker which has received the highest praise from Channing, Charles Lamb and many others the writings of John Woolman by heart wrote Lamb and loved the early Quakers the charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and innocence of feeling the deep inward stillness peculiar to the people called Quakers apart from his constant use of certain phrases peculiar to the friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful and pure the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere and tender and humble in its sincerity as a tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the monthly quarterly and yearly meetings of friends traveling on horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina and northward along the coast as far as Boston and Nantucket he was under a concern and a heavy exercise touching the keeping of slaves and by his writing and speaking did much to influence the Quakers against slavery his love went out indeed to all the wretched and oppressed sailors and to the Indians in particular one of his most perilous journeys was made to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania at Bethlehem and at well-losing on the Susquehanna some of the scruples which Woolman felt and the quaint naivete with which he expresses them may make the modern reader smile but it is a smile which is very close to a tear thus when in England where he died in 1772 he would not ride and would send a letter by mail-coach because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter nights and were sometimes frozen to death so great is the hurry in the spirit of this world that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth the creation at this day doth loudly groan again having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress etc the use of dyed garments grew uneasy to him and he got and wore a hat of the natural color of the fur in attending meetings this singularity was a trial to me and some friends who knew not from what motives I wore it grew shy of me those who spoke with me I generally informed in a few words that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will end of part 2 chapter 2 recording by Kalinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 7th, 2009