acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. - This is an American."

The contrast between these two passages is sharp. Hopkinson's American is, after all, a human being; Crèvecœur's American is no more human than some ideal savage of Vol- ✅ taire; and yet, in Crèvecœur's time and since, it has been the fashion to suppose that the French understand us better than our true brothers, the English.

For this there is a certain ground. Englishmen are not accessible to general ideas; and they are not explosive. The French are both; and so, like the subjects of Queen Elizabeth, are the native Americans. Since 1775, then, America has often seemed more nearly at one with France than with England. Suggestive evidence of a deeper truth may be found in the career of the national hero whom the French cherish in common with ourselves, Lafayette. Stirred by enthusiasm for the rights of man, he offered his sword to those rebellious colonies whom he believed to be fighting for mere abstract principles; and he had warrant for his belief, in the glittering generalities of the Declaration of Independence. He saw our Revolution triumphant. He went back to France, and saw the Revolution there end in tragic failure. To the last he could never guess why the abstract principles which had worked so admirably in America would not work in France. The real truth he never perceived. Whatever reasons the revolutionary Americans gave for their conduct, their underlying impulse was one which they had inherited unchanged from their immigrant ancestors; namely, that the rights for which men should die are not abstract but legal. The abstract phrases of the American Revolution, deeply as they have affected the surface of American thought, remain superficial. By 1775, however, the course of American history had made our conception of legal rights different from that

of the English. We had developed local traditions of our own, which we believed as immemorial as ever were the local traditions of the mother country. The question of representation, for example, was not abstract; it was one of established constitutional practice; but when we came to discussing it, we did not understand each other's terms. Misunderstanding followed, a family quarrel, a civil war, and world disunion. Beneath this world disunion, all the while, is a deeper fact, binding America and England at last together at heart, — each really and truly believed itself to be asserting the rights which immemorial custom had sanctioned. Revolutionary France, on the other hand, tried to introduce into human history a system of abstract rights different from anything which ever flourished under the sun. Naturally it came to grief. And Lafayette, who never even in his dreams suspected the force and vitality of that Common Law tradition which is instinctively cherished by every English-speaking race, never understood what either revolution really signified.

Slight, vague, and cursory as our consideration has been, we can now perhaps begin to see what the American Revolution means. By 1775, the national experience which had been accumulating in England from the days of Queen Elizabeth had brought the temper of the native English to a state very remote from what this native temper had been under the Tudor sovereigns. In that same year the lack of economic pressure to which we have given the name of national inexperience had kept the original American temper singularly unaltered. When at last, on the accession of George III., legal and constitutional questions were presented in the same terms to English-speaking temperaments on different sides of the Atlantic, these temperaments had been forced, by mere historic circumstance, so far apart that they honestly could not understand each other. Neither of them, then, would have been true to the deepest traditions of their common race, had anything less than the Revolution resulted.

VIII

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1776 TO 1800

THE first six chapters of Mr. Henry Adams's "History of the United States" admirably set forth the stagnation of mental life in America between the close of the Revolution and the beginning of the nineteenth century. For half a generation or more our newly independent country was adrift; the true course of our national life was slow in declaring itself. Until the very end of the eighteenth century, then, we remained without trace of lasting literature. just as in earlier periods there had been writing which a study like ours cannot quite neglect, so during the last quarter of this eighteenth century there was a good deal of publication at which we must glance.

But

One fact is instantly salient. No one who has written of our literary expression during the period in question has made much distinction between public men and those who for courtesy's sake may be styled pure men of letters. It is doubtful whether anything could much more have surprised Washington, or John Adams, or Jefferson, or Madison, or Hamilton, or the rest, than to find themselves discussed in the literary history of their country much as their eminent contemporary Dr. Johnson is discussed in the literary history of England. Without doubt, however, the father of our country, together with that eminent band of political obstetricians who cooperated at its birth, not only displayed practical skill, but also wrote memorably about the matters which engaged their attention. So, for want of any memorable literature during our early years of independence, our literary historians have

been glad to treat our elder public men as men of letters

too.

In this the historians have been right. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century our public men wrote in admirable style. They were earnestly thoughtful; they had strong common sense; they were far-sighted and temperate; and they expressed themselves with that dignified urbanity which in their time marked the English of educated people. In purely literary history, however, they can hardly be regarded as much more important than Blackstone is in the literary history of England.

This kind of American writing reached its acme in 1787 and 1788, when Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay supported the still unaccepted Constitution of the United States in a remarkable series of political essays, named the "Federalist." As a series of formal essays, the "Federalist " groups itself roughly with the "Tatler," the "Spectator," and those numerous descendants of theirs which fill the literary records of eighteenth-century England. It differs, however, from all these, in both substance and purpose. The "Tatler," the "Spectator," and their successors dealt with superficial matters in a spirit of literary amenity: the "Federalist" deals, in an argumentative spirit as earnest as that of any Puritan divine, with political principles paramount in our history; and it is so wisely thoughtful that one may almost declare it the permanent basis of sound thinking concerning American constitutional law. Like all the educated writing of the eighteenth century, too, it is phrased with a rhythmical balance and urbane polish which give it claim to literary distinction. After all, however, one can hardly feel it much more significant in a history of pure letters than are the opinions in which a little later Judge Marshall and Judge Story developed and expounded the constitutional law which the "Federalist" commented on. Its true character appears when we remember the most important thing published in England during the

same years, the poetry of Robert Burns. The contrast between Burns and the "Federalist" tells the whole literary story. Just as in the seventeenth century the only serious literature of America was a phase of that half-historical, halftheological sort of work which had been a minor part of English literature generations before; so in the eighteenth century the chief product of American literature was an extremely ripe example of such political pamphleteering as in England had been a minor phase of letters during the period of Queen Anne. Pure letters in America were still to come.

Even during the seventeenth century, however, as we saw in our glance at the "Tenth Muse," Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, there had been in America sporadic and consciously imitative efforts to produce something literary. So there were during the eighteenth century. We had sundry writers of aphoristic verse remotely following the tradition of Pope; and we had satire, modelled on that of Charles Churchill, a popular contemporary writer, now remembered mostly because some of our ancestors paid him the compliment of imitation. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, a little group of clever and enthusiastic men made a serious attempt to establish a native literature; and though the results of this effort were neither excellent nor permanent, the effort was earnest and characteristic enough to deserve attention.

To understand its place in our literary records we must recall something of our intellectual history. This may be said to have begun with the foundation of Harvard College as a seminary of scholarly tradition in 1636. Throughout the seventeenth century, Harvard, then the only school of the higher learning in America, remained the only organised centre of American intellectual life. Cotton Mather, we remember, was a Harvard graduate, a member of the Board of Overseers and of the Corporation, and an eager aspirant for the presidency of the college. Long before his busy life was ended, however, the tendency toward liberalism which has