Tuckerman, Halleck, and Griswold among our early critics, besides paying tribute to Longfellow, Lowell, and Poe. This array of names is imposing, but it is lacking in discrimination. Some of the names do not count at all in a serious survey of the subject; others of them count only in a minor and secondary way; but a few of them must be reckoned with. Aside from Poe and Lowell, who will be considered later, even a summary review of our earlier critical endeavor should find space to mention Verplanck for his "Discourses on American History, Art, and Literature" as well as for his edition of Shakespeare, Griswold for his several compilations of American poetry, Prescott for his miscellaneous studies in American and European literature, Tuckerman for his "Thoughts on the Poets," and many other volumes of graceful writing, Channing for his “Essay on National Literature" and his Remarks on Milton," Longfellow for his "Poets and Poetry of Europe," Bryant for his review of Solyman Brown's "Essay on American Poetry," and Dana for his lectures on Shakespeare and his elaborate critical reviews. 66 66 It would be invidious to single out any one of these writers as the father of literary criticism" in America. Perhaps Bryant would come as near as any to deserving that title, by virtue of the article. above mentioned, which appeared in "The North American Review" for 1818. But Bryant's critical writing was merely incidental to a career that achieved distinction in other fields, and too inconsiderable in amount to call for much attention. A better case is made out for Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), who in the years 1817-19 contributed to that Review a number of lengthy critical studies. It is not an American critic, but one from the other side of the Atlantic, John Nichol, who speaks of certain of these studies as "the most appreciative and subtle criticisms of the English Lake poets that had, up to that date, anywhere appeared." The most important of these studies is a review, filling something like a hundred pages, of Hazlitt's "Lectures on the English Poets," and is a really admirable piece of critical writing done in the approved eighteenth-century manner. It may be noted also that the series of miscellaneous writings of a few years later, which Dana collectively styled "The Idle Man," includes a penetrating critique of "Kean's Acting"- perhaps the most important early example of dramatic criticism in American literature. The suggestion of a belated eighteenth-century manner in Dana's criticism is not merely accidental. American literature has always, until very recently, shown a tendency to hark back to the English models of an earlier age. This tendency, which seems to have been a consequence of the arrested development resulting from transplantation, was very marked during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and continued to be manifest well down into the nineteenth. Professor Barrett Wendell, who has brought out and illustrated this principle more clearly than any other writer, has made of it, so to speak, the essential formula of American literary development. It falls in, then, with the general character of contemporary writing in this country that our early reviewers should have clothed their opinions in the ponderous garb of the eighteenth-century essayists, and made their pronouncements with a sort of pontifical emphasis. At the very time when British criticism was being refashioned in freer and more flexible forms by such men as Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, American criticism was still proceeding upon the assumption that literature was a matter of fixed and rigid laws, which it was the duty of the critic to apply to the case in hand with Rhadamanthine sternness. The seething literary ambitions of the twenties and thirties were by no means confined to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, the three recognized centres of intellectual activity. Would-be literary centres in various other parts of the country were asserting their claims, and giving them embodiment in new periodical enterprises. In the South, Baltimore had not unfounded pretensions of this sort, and in the West, Lexington and Cincinnati were rivals for recognition. New magazines and reviews were started in the most unexpected places — in Knoxville, Tennessee, in Oxford, Ohio, and in Vandalia, Illinois. In 1849, Oquaqua, Illinois, had aspirations for literary prestige, and tried to persuade Edgar Allan Poe to migrate thither for the purpose of editing a magazine. Dr. W. B. Cairns, in his valuable study of American literature from 1815 to 1833, enumerates over one hundred and fifty periodicals, more or less literary in character, established during that period. Pitiful enough most of them were, no doubt, but they have their place in the history of American culture. A natural consequence of this dispersion of energy was an excessive display of the provincial spirit. Small local rivalries and petty personal jealousies had a more prominent place in criticism than the discussion of principles. Even Poe, the foremost critic of this period, could not always rise above partisanship and sectional prejudice, and his work is frequently marred by the exhibition of an un worthy petulance directed toward the New England writers. This provincialism had its natural result in the production of a great deal of writing in the form of criticism which was in reality not critical at all. It was mere boastfulness, and its purpose was to make claims in behalf of the writers of this or that section rather than to arrive at disinterested conclusions. It was utterly ephemeral, no doubt, and it seems particularly amusing when we consider that the entire nation which included all these aspiring literary centres was only just beginning to produce books that belonged to literature. Even when this vaunting of the domestic product took the form of an appeal to national pride rather than to a narrowly local self-esteem it was equally amusing in its vainglorious pretensions. The final word upon this tendency was said in "A Fable for Critics." "But what's that? a mass-meeting? No, there come in lots The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts, And in short the American everything elses, Each charging the other with envies and jealousies; And of other great characters hardly a score (One might safely say less than that rather than more), One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons, It is to be feared that the tendency thus satirized has not even yet altogether disappeared from American criticism. We are still occasionally bidden to behold in Bryant a poet of the true Wordsworthian > stamp, and to discover serious parallelisms between the graceful workmanship of Longfellow and the divine art of Tennyson, while more than one writer of dialect doggerel has been dubbed an American Burns by innocent critics quite devoid of any sense of absolute literary values. Lowell could afford to say the sharp things that he put into "A Fable for Critics," because he was himself over-zealous, if anything, as a champion of American ideas. His indignation at the condescension of foreigners is familiar to us all, and his aggressive way of resenting their real or fancied slights is sufficiently pronounced to satisfy our most ardent patriots. His sense of humor, however, made him see clearly that much of our early criticism was the result of a determination "to find swans in birds of quite another species." But if, on the one hand, he made goodnatured sport of this exaggerated Americanism, on the other, he had no patience whatever with our weak imitation of British models or with our obsequious deference to British opinion. That these qualities were characteristic of our early nineteenth-century literature is evident upon a very cursory inspection. In Bryant's "North American Review" article, already mentioned, the writer finds American poetry tinged with a sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of some of the late popular poets of |