A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many
years. It was my design not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of
authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide
track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress,
and the decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as the objects
presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals.
In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves,
some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation.
Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a
philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a
philosophy of books where their subjects, their tendency, and their
immediate or gradual influence over the people discover their actual
condition.
Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion; the great form an
epoch, the many reflect their age. With them the transient becomes
permanent, the suppressed lies open, and they are the truest
representatives of their nation for those very passions with which they
are themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writer transmits to us the
public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual
history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of
society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their
pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncrasy, we
are deeply interested in the secret connexion of the incidents of their
lives with their intellectual habits. In the development of that
predisposition which is ever working in characters of native force, all
their felicities and their failures, and the fortunes which such men
have shaped for themselves, and often for the world, we discover what is
not found in biographical dictionaries, the history of the mind of the
individual--and this constitutes the psychology of genius.
In the midst of my studies I was arrested by the loss of sight; the
papers in this collection are a portion of my projected history.
The title prefixed to this work has been adopted to connect it with its
brothers, the "Curiosities of Literature," and "Miscellanies of
Literature;" but though the form and manner bear a family resemblance,
the subject has more unity of design.
The author of the present work is denied the satisfaction of reading a
single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespass on
the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been
confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can
no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in
the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate
patience of filial devotion.