sense. But the time comes to every people when, finding itself in the possession of a considerable body of works, the bequest of many generations, it turns to the examination of its inheritance, seeking to account to itself for the various kinds of excellence in literature, to analyze, to classify, and to formulate the underlying laws of literary composition. It produces an Aristotle to expound the philosophy of the drama and the epic, a Quintilian to penetrate the secrets of oratorical power, a Boileau to set forth the principles of the art of poetry, a Lessing to differentiate the province of poetry from that of sculpture and painting, a Coleridge to view literature in the light of the eternal verities of the spirit. In a word, the creative impulse slackens and formal criticism supervenes. Henceforth, the literature of this people may no longer be the spontaneous thing that it has been; it may never again be the product of "that first fine careless rapture" of the morning of the race.

Through some such development as this the literature of every people must pass of every people, that is, which grows up from infancy upon its own soil. But while the process thus outlined is typically illustrated by English literature, it is not, of course, to be looked for in the history of American literature, which is nothing more than that part of English literature produced in the new world during three centuries of English occupation. The question here is not of beginning, but of going on under the conditions of the new environment. The biological analogy is to be sought, not in the growth of the tree from the seedling, but rather in the modifications which the tree undergoes when, full-grown, it is transplanted to new soil. Now the invariable consequence of transplanting a tree is that all the processes of growth are

retarded. It takes time to recover from the shock of uprooting and then it takes more time to strike root in the new earth and test its powers of sustenance. For a while, it is a question of keeping alive at all; such matters as growth and the putting forth of flowers and fruit must wait until existence has been made secure. This analogy offers a precise explanation of what happened, as far as the production of literature is concerned, when, in the seventeenth century, the civilization of England was transplanted to the eastern coast of North America. The common speech of the time bears witness to the truthfulness of this comparison; the colonies were "planted," and more frequently than anything else were called "plantations."

Bringing with them to the new world, as they did, the inherited culture of centuries, and being, as they were, not men of average ability and enterprise, but the picked men of the race, the English settlers in America might easily enough, as far as we can see, have carried on the literary tradition of the mother country. But the peculiar mixture of religious and political motives which impelled these men to seek new homes in the wilderness operated to select a class of colonists that were not predisposed toward the cultivation of the literary graces. These men, "flying from the depravations of Europe to the American strand," had a more serious task than that of writing poems and plays. In fact, they held literature, in its noblest Elizabethan manifestations, to be chief among those depravations that they were seeking to escape. In sheer intellectual power, Cotton Mather is a fair match for Samuel Johnson, and the contrast between these two autocrats is typical of the contrast between the two societies over which they respectively held

sway. The lives of our New England forbears were Strenuous indeed, not in the cheap physical sense, but in the sense of straining for ideal goals, and waging constant battle with the adversaries of the spirit.

It is small wonder, then, that the colonial period of American history produced little literature of the sort that men cherish for its intrinsic worth. For nearly two centuries our.annals are barren in this respect save for an occasional gleam of fancy or imagination, such as could hardly fail to occur in so voluminous and earnest a mass of writing as that which was left us by our early politicians and theologians. If there were no poems or plays or novels worthy of the name, still less was there anything that might be called literary criticism, during these two centuries of the slow upbuilding of the commonwealth. Men read books, no doubt, and had opinions concerning them, but these opinions found no published expression of the kind that arrests attention and interests the readers of a later day. It would be possible to glean from the books and other publications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable collection of haphazard views about literature, but it would not be profitable for the purposes of the present cursory sketch.

Not until early in the nineteenth century did literature in America become what we commonly understand by the term-a product in which artistic considerations prevail over all others. The preceding centuries had shown much industry in the recording of historical facts, more or less quaintly colored, and in the promulgation of theological and political doctrines, more or less passionately urged. They had produced a great metaphysician in Jonathan Edwards, and a shrewd commentator upon nature

and human affairs in Benjamin Franklin. They had even made an approach to literature proper in the belletristic trifling of the "Hartford Wits," Barlow, Trumbull, and Dwight. But of writing that is attrae tive by virtue of its literary quality, irrespective of any interest in its historical background. or its basis of abstract ideas, we had practically nothing, before the romances of Brown and Cooper, the miscellaneous prose of Paulding and Irving, and the poems of the youthful Bryant and his contemporaries. It was at the time when these men were gaining a wide hearing for their work, and giving evidence that America was at last ready to make a distinctive contribution to the common literature of the English people, that our first serious attempt was made to cultivate the hitherto untouched field of literary criticism.

Criticism as a department of literary production presupposes a certain degree of liberal cultivation among readers, and the existence, if not exactly of a leisure class, at least of a class sufficiently detached from the grosser cares of life to be able to take a serious and sustained interest in literature. It also presupposes the existence of suitable vehicles for its publication. Such a class of readers had for the first time appeared during the early decades of the nineteenth century, and such vehicles were provided by the magazines which were then springing up in astonishing profusion. With the exception of perhaps half a dozen, the very names of these periodicals are now forgotten, but they performed an important service for the cultivation of literary interests. Nor must the lecturer be forgotten in this outline of the conditions by which the growth of literary intelligence was stimulated during the earlier part of the century. The Lyceum system played an important part in the

development of our national, culture, and enlisted the services of many of our best men. Some of these lecture-courses found their way into print and thus appealed to still larger audiences. The lectures of Sanuel Lorenzo Knapp (1829), for example, elicited the following.comment, from an enthusiastic reviewer:

Long after the puny revilers of American genius shall have supplied the grocer with wrappings and the bookworm with food, the Lectures on American Literature will have a place in the library of the American scholar and minister to the instruction of American youth."

If the fame of Knapp has belied this forecast, the memory of Henry Reed has not wholly lapsed, and his lectures on English Literature" and on the "British Poets" still find occasional readers. Even John Quincy Adams, who was a man of letters before he became a statesman, was numbered among the lecturers on literary themes, discoursing with no little eloquence and acumen upon rhetoric and oratory, and upon the plays of Shakespeare.

In a letter written by George Ripley a few years. before his death to a young and over-zealous admirer who had styled him "the father of literary criticism in the American press," the following passage occurs:

"When I have the pleasure of seeing you again, I will enlighten your youthful mind on the history of American criticism, and you will hide your head in remorse. At present think of Bryant, Verplanck, Cogswell, Henry, Godwin, Greeley, Raymond, in New York; Dana, Channing, Tudor, Willard, Sparks, Everett, Palfrey, Willard Phillips, in Boston, all of whom were distinguished reviewers and critics before my name was ever heard of."

John Nichol, in his "American Literature," adds to this list such names as those of Prescott, Hillard,