THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN.
BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST.
Miracle plays, rude dramatic representations of the chief events in
Scripture history, were used for popular instruction before the invention
of printing. In England they began as early as the twelfth century.
Moral plays, or moralities, were of the same origin, though dating from
the fifteenth century. These were somewhat more refined than the miracle
plays, and usually set forth the excellence of the virtues, such as
truth, mercy, and the like. Both miracle and moral plays were under the
conduct of the clergy.
John Bale (1495-1563) was Bishop of Ossory, and wrote much for popular
reform. He was the author of nineteen miracle plays. Lord Edward
Herbert, of Cherbury (1581-1648), wrote a deistical work, _De Religione
Gentilium_, the first of that school of writers which later appeared in
Bolingbroke. John Spotiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St. Andrews and
afterward Chancellor of Scotland, wrote a voluminous _History of the
Church of Scotland_. George Sandys (1577-1643), {300} distinguished also
as one of the earliest literary characters in America, wrote metrical
versions of several of the poetical books of the Bible, and also a
tragedy called _Christ's Passion_.
John Knox (1505-1572), the great Scotch reformer and polemic, while more
prominent as the preacher and spokesman of the Scotch Reformation, wrote
_First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_
(1558), and the _Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the
Realme of Scotland_, published after his death. John Jewel (1522-1571)
wrote in Latin his _Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae_. William Whittingham
(1524-1589), who succeeded Knox as pastor of the English Church at
Geneva, aided in making the Genevan Version of the Bible and also
co-operated in the Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Psalms.
John Fox (1517-1587) was the author of the _Book of Martyrs_, whose full
title was _Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, Touching
Matters of the Church_. An abridgment of the work has had a very wide
circulation. John Aylmer (1521-1594) replied to Knox's _First Blast of
the Trumpet_ in a work called _An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects_.
Nicholas Sanders (1527-1580), a Roman Catholic professor of Oxford, wrote
_The Rock of the Church_, a defense of the primacy of Peter and the
Bishops of Rome. Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a Jesuit, wrote several
works in advocacy of Roman Catholicism and some political tracts.
{301}
John Rainolds (1549-1607), a learned Hebraist of Oxford, wrote many
ecclesiastical works in Latin and English. He was a chief promoter of
King James's Version of the Bible. Miles Smith, (died 1624), Thomas
Bilson (1536-1616), John Boys (1560-1643), and George Abbot (1562-1633),
Archbishop of Canterbury, were all co-workers on the King James
translation of the Scriptures.
Next in importance to the English Bible in its effect upon literature
stands the English Prayer Book, which is the rich mosaic of many minds.
It came through _The Prymer_ of the fourteenth century, and contained the
more fundamental and familiar portions of the _Book of Common Prayer_,
such as the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Litany, and the
Apostles' Creed. This compilation differed in form and somewhat in
content in the different dioceses in England, and was partly in Latin and
partly in English. In 1542 an attempt was made to produce a common form
for all England and to have it entirely in English. The Committee of
Convocation, who had the work in charge, were prevented from making it
complete through the refusal of Henry VIII to continue the approval which
he had given to the appointment of the committee. However, under Edward
VI a commission, headed by Archbishop Cranmer, carried their work
through, and it was accepted and its use made compulsory by Parliament.
It was published in 1549 as the _First Prayer Book of Edward VI_. Three
years later the _Second Prayer {302} Book of Edward VI_ was issued, it
being a revision of the First, also under the shaping hand of Cranmer.
The _Prayer Book_ received its final revision and substantially its
present form in the reign of Elizabeth, in 1559, although in 1662 there
was added to the Morning and Evening Prayer a Collection of Prayers and
Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions. Gathering thus through three
centuries the choice treasures of confession and devotion of the strong
and reverent English nation, it has been a large element in the literary
training, not only of communicants in the Anglican, the Episcopal, and
the Methodist Churches, but, in a measure, also of those who have
received their religious instruction and have worshiped in other branches
of the Protestant Church.
The work of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1643-1649),
particularly the _Confession of Faith_, and the _Shorter Catechism_,
became, as specimens of strong and pure English, potent factors in the
intellectual and literary discipline of the Presbyterians in all parts of
the world.
The modern psalms and hymns, or the simplified and popularized forms of
the earlier and mediaeval worship, have had vastly to do with the daily
thought and education of the people into whose life they have brought not
only increase of lofty devotion but also a positive and stimulative
culture.
Foremost of these collections was that made by Thomas Sternhold, John
Hopkins, and others, and {303} known as the _Psalter of Sternhold and
Hopkins_, published in 1562. Francis Rouse made a version in 1645,
which, after revision, was adopted in 1649, and largely used by the
Scotch Church. A new version was that by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady,
which appeared in 1696, and has since been called the _Psalter of Tate
and Brady_. The first English hymn book adapted for public worship was
that of Isaac Watts, appearing about 1709, although several minor
collections and individual productions had preceded Watts, among which
should be mentioned those of Joseph Stennett, John Mason, and the fine
hymns of Bishop Ken and Joseph Addison.
A little later the prolific and spiritual Charles Wesley, aided by the
somewhat stricter taste of his more celebrated brother, John, began
(1739) his wonderful series of published hymns, which, together with
those of Watts, have since formed the larger portion of the Protestant
hymnody of the world. Others of the eighteenth century who have made
contributions to the sacred lyrics of the Church are John Byrom
(1691-1763), Philip Doddridge (1702-1751), Joseph Hart (1712-1768), Anne
Steele (1716-1778), Benjamin Beddome (1717-1795), John Cennick
(1717-1755), Thomas Olivers (1725-1799), Joseph Grigg (1728-1768),
Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778), and Edward Perronet (died 1792).
Approaching our own time, the ranks of our hymn writers include James
Montgomery {304} (1771-1854), whose _Christian Psalmist_ was published in
1825, Thomas Kelly, of Dublin (1769-1855); Harriet Auber (1773-1832),
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Sir Robert Grant (1785-1838), Josiah Conder
(1789-1855), Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871), Sir John Bowring (1792-1872),
Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847), John Keble (1792-1866), whose _Christian
Year_ came out in 1827; John H. Newman (1801-1890), Sarah Flower Adams
(1805-1849), and Horatius Bonar (1808-1869).
Richard Mant (1776-1848), Henry Alford (1810-1871), F. W. Faber
(1815-1863), John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Miss Catherine Winkworth (born
1829), and some others, have given many beautiful and stirring
translations from the Latin and German hymns of the ancient and mediaeval
periods.
Theological writers of the middle of the seventeenth century are
numerous. Chief of those belonging to the Anglican Church may be named
Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich (1574-1656), whose _Episcopacy by Divine
Right_ was replied to in _Smectymnus_, the joint production of five
dissenting divines: Stephen Marshal, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew
Newcomer, and William Spurston; James Ussher (1580-1656), a man of vast
literary learning and most known by his _Sacred Chronology_, published
after his death; Thomas Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, mentioned in a previous
chapter; John Cosin (1594-1672), who wrote chiefly devotional treatises;
William Chillingworth {305} (1602-1664), whose _Religion of Protestants_
has had a wide circulation; John Pearson (1612-1686), whose _Exposition
of the Creed_ became a standard; Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), whose
_Intellectual System of the Universe_ dealt a stunning blow to the
atheism of his day, and Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), the learned
vice-chancellor of Cambridge, wit, mathematician, and theologian all in
one, who left a rich legacy in his _Sermons_.
Of the Non-conforming authors deserving notice Richard Baxter (1615-1691)
is the most voluminous, if not also the most luminous. Controversy
engaged his pen almost constantly, but his most permanent works were his
_Call to the Unconverted_ and _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_. John Owen
(1616-1683) was a leading Puritan writer, and under Cromwell was
vice-chancellor of Oxford University. His _Commentary on the Epistle to
the Hebrews_ and his book on _The Holy Spirit_ are still in use and
highly prized. His pen was strong rather than elegant. John Bunyan's
immortal allegory throws a halo on universal literature. John Howe
(1630-1705), the chief author among the Puritans, wrote many strong
works, among which of special note are _The Living Temple_ and _The
Office and Work of the Holy Spirit_. He was Cromwell's chaplain.
The spiritual writings of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), the Scotch
divine; the _Annotations on the Psalms_ by Henry Ainsworth (died 1662),
an Independent, who was an exile in Holland for {306} conscience' sake;
the expository writings of Thomas Manton (1620-1677); the _Synopsis_ of
Matthew Poole (1624-1679), later abridged into his celebrated
_Annotations upon the Bible_; the sermons of Stephen Charnock
(1628-1680), particularly the one on "The Divine Attributes;" and _An
Alarm to Unconverted Sinners_, by Joseph Alleine (1633-1688), which has
had an immense circulation, form a galaxy in the theological firmament of
the time of Milton.
A later group of theological writers in the latter part of the
seventeenth century contains the commanding figures of Symon Patrick
(1626-1707), bishop and author of a _Commentary on the Old Testament_;
John Flavel (1627-1691) and his works on practical piety; John Tillotson
(1630-1694), the Anglican archbishop, whose eloquent sermons are still
held in high repute; Robert South (1633-1716), the great pulpit orator,
whose discourses are an ornament to the English tongue; Edward
Stillingfleet (1635-1699), from whose prolific pen came several valuable
treatises, one of which was _The Antiquities of the British Churches_;
and William Beveridge (1637-1708), whose _Private Thoughts upon Religion_
is still in much esteem. To these we may add Thomas Ken (1637-1710), the
good bishop now best known as the author of _Praise God, from Whom all
Blessings Flow_; Benjamin Keach (1640-1704), a Baptist preacher of much
note and author of _Gospel Mysteries Opened_, which, like his other
writings, is marred by an {307} excessive use of figures; Gilbert Burnet
(1643-1709), the writer and bishop, who mingled freely in the political
affairs of the day and wrote much on a variety of subjects, one being a
_History of the Reformation of the Church of England_; William Wall
(1646-1728), the prominent defender of infant baptism; Humphrey Prideaux
(1648-1724), who wrote the _Connection of the Old and New Testaments_;
and Matthew Henry (1662-1714), still valued for his quaint and suggestive
_Commentary on the Scriptures_.
Here, too, belong George Fox (1624-1690) and Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
the heroic founder and the learned champion of the Society of Friends,
the former's _Journal_ and the latter's _Apology for the True Christian
Divinity_ being worthy of special note. William Penn (1644-1718), more
eminent as the chief colonizer of Pennsylvania, also wrote many powerful
works in advocacy of Quaker teachings; and William Sewel's (1650-1726)
_History of the Quakers_ is a notable contribution to the literature of
that much-misunderstood and persecuted people.
Among those who graced the first half of the eighteenth century we find
the Irish man of letters, Charles Leslie (1650-1722), who gave among
others a celebrated treatise on _A Short and Easy Method with the
Deists_; Francis Atterbury (1662-1732), Bishop of Rochester, whose
_Sermons_ still survive; William Wollaston (1659-1724), known as the
author of _The Religion of Nature_, a plea for truth; Samuel Clarke
(1675-1729), the {308} philosophical writer of _The Demonstration of the
Being and Attributes of God_; Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), the leading
deist of his day, whose chief work was _Christianity as Old as Creation_;
Robert Wodrow (1679-1734), a Scotch preacher who wrote a _History of the
Sufferings of the Church of Scotland_; and Thomas Wilson (1663-1755),
Bishop of Sodor and Man for fifty-seven years and the author of many
useful works on the Scriptures and Christianity. Bishop Joseph Butler
(1692-1752) appeared as the champion of Christianity and successfully
answered the deistical tendency of Tindal and others by his _Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature_, which, though obscure in style, is still in high repute for its
massive thought and mighty logic.
Thomas Stackhouse (1680-1752) and his _History of the Bible_; John
Bampton (1689-1751), whose estate still speaks at Oxford in defense of
Christianity in the annual lectures on Divinity; Daniel Waterland
(1683-1740), in his defense of the divinity of Christ; and Joseph Bingham
(1668-1723), in his learned treatise on _The Antiquities of the Christian
Church_, are also in the front rank of this period. Daniel Neal
(1678-1743), in his _History of the Puritans_; John Leland (1691-1766),
the Dublin preacher, in his _View of the Deistical Writers_; and Philip
Doddridge (1702-1751), in his _Family Expositor_ and his briefer and more
famous _Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_, furnished valuable
contributions to theological literature.
{309}
The latter half of the eighteenth century was prolific of letters.
Noteworthy among those who wrote on religious themes are the following:
Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768), who wrote _The Credibility of the Gospel
History_; William Law (1687-1761), whose _Serious Call to a Holy Life_
and _Christian Perfection_ are still powerful works; Richard Challoner
(1691-1781), a Roman Catholic author of many practical and devotional
works and of a _Version of the Bible_, much prized in his own Church;
Alban Butler (1700-1773), who compiled _The Lives of the Saints_; William
Warburton (1698-1779), in his _Divine Legation of Moses_; Alexander
Cruden (1701-1770), the Scotch author of the famous _Concordance to the
Holy Scriptures_; and Lord George Lyttleton (1708-1773), the author of
_Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul_.
In the same category belong: Robert Lowth (1710-1787), whose book on
_Hebrew Poetry_ is still consulted; James Hervey (1713-1758), whose
_Meditations_ became very popular; Hugh Blair (1718-1800), the Scotchman
whose _Sermons_ for many years rivaled his _Lectures on Rhetoric_ in
popularity; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), illustrious in the annals of
chemical discovery, who wrote _Institutes of Natural and Revealed
Religion_, and is one of the most distinguished Socinian writers; and
William Paley (1743-1805), whose _Natural Theology_ and _Horae Paulinae_
are still standard works.
During this period also came the great impulse {310} to the literature of
the common people through the tireless pen of John Wesley (1703-1791),
whose _Sermons and Notes on the New Testament_ have had a powerful
influence wherever the Wesleyan revival has spread. James McKnight
(1721-1800), the scholarly commentator and harmonist; John Fletcher
(1729-1785), the sweet-souled defender of Methodism and author of _Checks
to Antinomianism_; Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816), the learned
apologist; Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778); the hymnist and polemic;
Joseph Milner (1744-1797), the Church historian; Thomas Coke (1747-1814),
in his _Commentary on the Old and New Testaments_; and Andrew Fuller
(1754-1815) were authors of marked force and ability.
Belonging to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the leading
theological productions are _The Immateriality and Immortality of the
Soul_, by Samuel Drew (1765-1833); the _Translation of the Book of Job_,
by John Mason Good (1764-1827); the popular _Commentaries on the Bible_
by Thomas Scott (1747-1821), Adam Clarke (1762-1832), and Joseph Benson
(1748-1821); the _Sermons_ of Robert Hall (1764-1831), the great Baptist
preacher; the _Introduction to the Literary History of the Bible_, by
James Townley (died 1833); the missionary narratives of Henry Martyn
(1781-1812), William Ward (1769-1822) and John Williams (1796-1839); and
the pathetic story of _The Dairyman's Daughter_, by Legh Richmond
(1772-1827). A little later in this century the first ranks {311} of
theological scholarship include the Wordsworths--Christopher (1774-1846),
the brother of the poet, and his two sons, Charles (1806-1892) and
Christopher, Jr. (1809-1885).
_Tracts for the Times_, written by a group of men styling themselves
Anglo-Catholics, whose leaders were Edward B. Pusey (1800-1882), John H.
Newman (1801-1890), John Keble (1792-1866), Richard H. Froude and others,
began in 1833, and for several years continued to be published, reaching
ninety in number. Their main purpose was a discussion and defense of the
character and work of the Established Church, but a large result was that
several of the leading spirits, with about two hundred clergymen and the
same number of prominent laymen, became Roman Catholics. This
High-Church series of writings was followed in 1860 by _Essays and
Reviews_, a volume containing seven articles, whose authors were
Frederick Temple (born 1821), Rowland Williams (1817-1870), Baden Powell
(1796-1860), Henry B. Wilson (born 1804), C. W. Goodwin, Mark Pattison
(1813-1884), and Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893). The purpose of these men
was to liberalize the thought of the Church. They accomplished this
result, and with it the overthrow of the faith of some.
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), the great Scotch preacher, left much fruit
of his pen, the most celebrated being _Astronomical Discourses_. Other
distinguished books are: _A Practical View of {312} Christianity_, by
William Wilberforce (1759-1833); _Horae Homileticae_, by Charles Simeon
(1759-1836); _The Lives of Knox and Melville_, by Thomas McCrie
(1772-1835); _Horae Mosaicae_, by George Stanley Faber (1773-1854); _The
Scripture Testimony to the Messiah_, by John Pye Smith (1774-1851);
_Theological Institutes_, by the Wesleyan theologian, Richard Watson
(1781-1833); the _Histories of the Jews_ and _of Christianity_, by Henry
Hart Milman (1791-1868); the _Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature_, by
John Kitto (1804-1854); _Mammon_, by John Harris (1804-1856); the
_Theological Essays_ of John Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872);
_Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church_, by Alexander Duff
(1806-1878); the _Sermons_ of Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853);
and _The Life and Epistles of Paul_, by William J. Conybeare (1815-1857)
and John S. Howson (1816-1885).
The latter half of the present century has been marked by many strong and
profound theological publications, of which we may name as worthy of
particular notice: _The Introduction to the Study of the Holy
Scriptures_, by Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862); _Historic Doubts
Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte_, by Richard Whately (1787-1863);
_Apologia pro Vita Sua_ of John H. Newman (1801-1890); _The Typology of
Scripture_, by Patrick Fairbairn (1805-1892); _The Eclipse of Faith_, by
Henry Rogers (1806-1877); the _Notes on the Parables and Miracles_, by
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886); {313} _The Temporal Mission of the
Holy Ghost_, by Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892); the series of lectures
on the Scriptures, by John Gumming (1810-1881); the _Greek New
Testament_, edited by Henry Alford (1810-1871); and the same by Samuel
Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875); the historical works of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley (1815-1881); _Hypatia, or Old Foes with a New Face_, by Charles
Kingsley (1819-1875); _Ecce Homo_, by John Robert Seeley (1834-1895); the
_Sermons_ of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892); and _Natural Law in the
Spiritual World_, the brilliant venture of the beloved and lamented Henry
Drummond (1851-1897), whose _Greatest Thing in the World_ bids fair to
become a Christian classic.
{317}
AMERICAN LITERATURE.
PREFACE.
This little volume is intended as a companion to the _Outline Sketch of
English Literature_, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In
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 seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that
the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a
guide-book to our literature. Though meant to be mainly a history of
American _belles-lettres_ it makes some mention of historical and
political writings, {318} 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 Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and
Richardson.
HENRY A. BEERS.
{319}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 . . . . . . . . . 321
II. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 . . . . . . 365
III. THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 . . . . 400
IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . . . 434
V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . 472
VI. LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 . . . . . . 511
VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
VIII. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN
AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
{321}
OUTLINE SKETCH OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
1607-1765.
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 seem 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,
hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said
Hawthorne, "was then in a {322} state incomparably more picturesque
than at present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the
seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing 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 and 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 and 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 {323}
thirteen 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 Shakspeare's death, and the hero of that enterprize,
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 vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his
_True Repertory of the Wrack and {324} Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_,
written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1510. Shakspere's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, 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 every-where,--
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 whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores~.~.~.
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours."
It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and 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 Guiana. 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, {325} who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry
Vane, the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend--
"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel 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 dally 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 guild are not quick to emigrate. They like 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
centers 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--too many, Captain Smith thought, 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 adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation
of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, {326} 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 water fronts on the rivers 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 court-house 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 {327} 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 Rev. 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 {328} 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
a tax 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
at 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 to the 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 {329} 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 a
restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of
contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite
for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the long bow. 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
Pocohontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of
early Virginian 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 {330} personality which they unconsciously display. They are
the rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was
mightier than 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 Sandys, who came
to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, 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, "limned" 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 the
muses." Sandys 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 ante-revolutionary
annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them
anonymous, and only rescued {331} from a manuscript condition a hundred
years after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations
of new territory. Such were 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 the 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
gentleman. 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 Orrery. 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 traveled 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
Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina.
{332} The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverley, "a
native and inhabitant of the place," whose History of Virginia was
printed at London in 1705. Beverley was a rich planter and large slave
owner, who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the
manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in
America_. Beverley was set upon writing his history by the
inaccuracies in this, and likewise because the province "has been so
misrepresented to the common people of England as to 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 the account of
the Indians, to which his third book is devoted, and which is
accompanied by valuable plates. Beverley'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.
{333}
The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of
England was established by law, and non-conformity 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 education or
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
Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to
the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance
of those ends _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 a
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 {334} intensity of character, their respect
for learning, and the heroic mood 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 whit inferior to that of the ministers
themselves. Church and State were one. The freeman's oath was only
administered to Church members, and there was no place in the social
system for unbelievers or {335} 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 Sandys, 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 "classis" or
immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in
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 author's arrival in England.
The Civil War, too, put a stop to {336} further emigration from England
until after the Restoration in 1660.
The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle
class, artisans and husbandmen, 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. It is 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 fifty
families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,
Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon
changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8,
1680, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the
building of something to begin a college." "An university," says
Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature
there cultivated, _sal Gentium_~.~.~. and a river, without the streams
whereof these regions would {337} 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
licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed
printing," for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his
_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some
twenty 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 meter, 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 Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63,
translated the Bible into the Algonkin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled
a lifetime for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies,"
"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but
bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so
entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe {338} Up-Biblum God naneeswe
Nukkone Testament kah wonk 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 Mather's _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 out-crops of the
movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these
refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute
Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and
later, Quakers, and still {339} later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into
their precincts and troubled the Churches with "prophesyings" 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
noteworthy 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 of Rhode Island, 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 Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same
called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John
Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody
Tenent 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 at odds with
the theology of {340} 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 the saints in
America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them,
sometimes even in visible 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 Familists, having, according to rumor,
been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. 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, "a
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 {341} accused 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-roll of those who had forsworn
God's service for the devil's. 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 Browne, 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 two
hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts
Puritans of {342} the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held
no beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous
wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and
the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a
kind of vulgar Walpurgis night.
The most important of original sources for 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 Plantation_ covers the
period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists,
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 in the historian's manner of recording them.
His style is pragmatic, {343} 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 divers 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, which should overcome Satan here and dispossess
him of his kingdom." The reader of Winthrop's _Journal_ comes
every-where 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 Merrymount_, of _Endicott's Red
Cross_, and of Whittier's _John Underhill_ and _The Familists' 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 wit, 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 harbor, "upon the top of the poop a man standing with one hand
akimbo 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 meterological {344} phenomenon took on the dimensions of a
full-grown myth some forty years later, as related, with many
embellishments, by Rev. 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 200
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
dramatic portraiture or 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 few
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 {345} 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 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, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter, N.
H.), where the Rev. 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 imprecations 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 {346} 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 and abundance of
tears, 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 imperii_, 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, and with the neighboring
plantations.
Considering our forefathers' errand 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 finely said that "when he was doing
his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were
their successors in the second or the third generation any less
industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works
do 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, {347} logical acuteness, and an
earnestness which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New
England, and the sermon was the great intellectual 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 vicissitude of the seasons, were
important enough to find record in print only in so far 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 to take down the words of the discourse in
their note-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 "tho' 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, the pulpit hour-glass was silently
inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto _n_'thly.
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's "Brahmin Caste of New England."
His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His {348} 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, _inter alia_, 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
and conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a
book-worm, whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and
his published works number 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: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful
Providences; VII. 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 _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.
Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers
used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but as literary
fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the {349} mother
country, that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists
introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner.
Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Browne,
Fuller, 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
mottled 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 sub-titles of his
books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_
many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs.
Hutchinson's surname into "the non-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 as 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_ call this
tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_. But there are no small
antiquaries who derive this _oaken religion_ and _philosophy_ from the
_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ {350} 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_, _Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us. Yea, there are
shrewd probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very
_Oak-plain_ before him; for this very place was called _Oyye_, which
was the name of _Noah_, so styled from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis
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_ retirements
for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon another account, behold
the students of _Harvard College_, as a rendezvous of happy _Druids_,
under the influences of so rare a president. But, alas! our joy must
be short-lived, for on _July_ 25, 1681, the stroke of a sudden death
felled the _tree_,
"Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes
Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi.
"Mr. _Oakes_ 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 inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the
history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined
to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting
work. {351} 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, Mass. 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, notwithstanding 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. After 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 dissenters, 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 of 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 sect or 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 {352}
authority over the laity. 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 Magnalia 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, reads less like sober fact than
like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and
plate and jewels and "pieces of eight."
Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of
Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is
intimately known through his Diary kept from 1673 to 1729. This has
been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, 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 minutiae {353} of
his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such
haps as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." 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 seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's journals bear to
that of the first generation. Sewall 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. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery,
in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700.
His _Phenomena Quaedam 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 Sewall_, 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 the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms {354}
of essay writing, character sketches, and literary criticism. There
was 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 by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets,"
whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner
of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New English muse, the
_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, 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:
COTTONIUS MATHERUS.
ANAGRAM.
_Tuos Tecum Ornasti_.
"While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise
_Thine, with thyself, thou dost immortalise_,
To view the odds thy learned lives invite
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite.
But all succeeding ages shall despair
A fitting monument for thee to _rear_.
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, {355} and similar conceits. The death of the
Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort
not to be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a
"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"--
"A stone for kingly David's use so fit
As would not fail Goliah'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 the
technical equipment of a poet. His verse is 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 Origen
need not have scrupled at.
The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan
Edwards {356} (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 asunder from
Edwards's "as from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings
belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity
and a spiritual elevation 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 dwelt 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, The Final
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
corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most {357} famous of Edwards's
sermons was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at
Enfield, Conn., July 8, 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 flames of 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 under
foot.~.~.~. He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall
be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But
Edwards was a rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of
the God, and there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his
_Treatise Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is 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 some one invisible always
conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his {358} great-grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, 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's English all is simple, precise,
direct, and business-like.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 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 Englishman 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 {359} 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 quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He
was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklaerung_,
_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth
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 forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the
Revolution; politics claimed 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 Courant_, 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 in his _Busy-Body_ papers
in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the
English deistical {360} writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became
himself a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his
trade in London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr.
Mandeville, author of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in
Cheapside, 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, whither 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 service, 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 {361}
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--and his residence in France as Embassador of the United
Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the
history of American science belong 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:
"_Erupuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis_."
Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved,
as few Americans since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among
his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly
idolized, and when he died Mirabeau 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 more
strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the
_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor
worse than other {362} imitations of Addison. But in some of his
lighter bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness
which have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story 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 consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and
political economy, contributions to the public questions of his 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 1771, 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 twenty-five
years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies. It was filled
with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of
industry, honesty, and frugality.[1] Some of these were original with
Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages,
but a new force was given {363} them by pungent turns of expression.
Poor Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great
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
to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would
bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."
Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin,
and Sainte 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 counterfeited;
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 in
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."
1. Captain John Smith. A True Relation of Virginia. Deane's edition.
Boston: 1866.
2. Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana. Hartford: 1820.
{364}
3. Samuel Sewall. Diary. Massachusetts Historical Collections. Fifth
Series. Vols. v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878.
4. Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Various Occasions. Vol. vii. of
Edwards's Words. Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829.
5. Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography. Edited by John Bigelow.
Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.]
6. Essays and Bagatelles. Vol. ii. of Franklin's Works. Edited by
David Sparks. Boston: 1836.
7. Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American Literature. 1607-1765.
New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.]
[1] _The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds,
Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money
Plenty in Every Man's Pocket, etc_.
{365}
CHAPTER II.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.
1765-1815.
It will be convenient to treat the fifty 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 of a
better term we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until the
nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the Revolution
had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these {366} 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 to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though
the most noteworthy of them will be 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 epochs 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, James Otis, 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 orotund 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
{367} 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 temporary 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 the
letter, in Wirt's 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. "I have but 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 price 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 {368} eloquence of
Patrick Henry was 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 of
the impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly
latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of
Fourth-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 such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock
wrote 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 to-day seems rather over rhetorical. Among the most important
of these political essays were the _Circular Letter to each Colonial
Legislature_, published by Adams {369} and Otis in 1768; Quincy's
_Observations on the Boston Port Bill_, 1774, and Otis's _Rights of the
British Colonies_, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed
in 1764. No collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The
life of Quincy, published by his 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 commonplaces in the
memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a
shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration 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 American literature." Jefferson {370} 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 in
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium 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 dye, 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 {371} Virginian,
John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slaveholder, in his speech on the
militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 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 thorough-going "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 are 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 4, 1801, with its programme 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 {372} 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 the _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, to 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 {373} 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 ablest constructive intellect among the
statesmen of our revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he
"had never known his equal;" whom Guizot classed 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 {374}
the Convention of New York, June 24, 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 eighty-five papers entitled the _Federalist_, printed
during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of
New York, over the signature "_Publius_." 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 the Treasury under Washington the foremost 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 4, 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 in 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 {375} the
composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It
is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in
expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the
United States, and his diary, kept from 1755-85, 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 {376} 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, previous to the
downfall of that party and 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 18, 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 to the law of good faith.~.~.~. It
is observed 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 annul its obligation."
Ames was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful,
more _literary_, in a way, than those {377} of his contemporaries. His
eulogiums on Washington and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather
excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in classical allusions. 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 the 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 {378} 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 27, 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 intrusted
to Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when
Paine was sent to prison.
The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the
name of "Tom Paine" 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 persiflage--the
_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser
materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism
was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Alien, 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. Paine was a man
without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no
scholar, and he was {379} 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
eighteenth century. But Paine'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 in many a
rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate
with the deacon or the school-master. Paine 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. {380} The sum total of a parson's learning is a b,
ab, and hic, haec, hoc, 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 time--_rari nantes in
gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness
than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth
century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes
of caste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan
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 _Busybody_ 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 has 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, writing in 1747 a poem
on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the trick of Pope's
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and
the didactic morality of the _Imitations_ from Horace and the _Moral
Essays_:
{381}
"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 belle and white-gloved beau,
The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
Fops, 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 thirty editions
in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American Loyalists, and
modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. 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 bon-fires of
the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill entreated,
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The
poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery
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 _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some
of its lines, which {382} have passed into currency as proverbs, are
generally attributed to Butler. For example:
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
Or this:
"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
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 as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith,
Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, 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, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and
literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of {383} _eclat_ 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 Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a
series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad,_ suggested by the
English _Rolliad_, 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 five
years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American
army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political
Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar
in character and 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.
Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and
was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he {384}
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 seventeen 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 Kalorama. Barlow's literary
fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the
_Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_,
published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged
into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to
Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. This was by far the most
sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in America,
and was embellished with plates executed by the best London engravers.
The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of
much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being
dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery {385} and
thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in
the last fifty years had read more than a hundred 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. As 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 him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and
fall of the kingdom 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
new-born 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 in 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 {386} over-elaborate, is good. One
couplet in particular has prevailed against oblivion:
"E'en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!"
Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The
Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of
Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not
published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, 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, Thomson,
and Beattie, 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 chanced to see the
stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_,
1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology
Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of
the Calvinism of Jonathan {387} 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
Southey, 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 and comic, Whig and Tory, 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 Tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody
on _Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre,
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 seem to have been adapted or {388} 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.,