T

HE slender beginnings' of American literature (see Vol. I. p. 832), in the main written by authors of English birth and published in the mothercountry, yielded little of even antiquarian memory beyond Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Anne Bradstreet's poems, and the Bay Psalm Book. Life in the colonies was, indeed, further illustrated by sermons, diaries, letters, and other records either then issued or collected since and made accessible by historical societies; but their importance is rather social than literary, and the same is true also of the most popular poem of the New England colonies, Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judg ment (1662), which for more than a century was in the place of a church classic for the Puritan Commonwealths. There was plenty of scholarly learning of the ecclesiastical sort then flourishing among the English Nonconformists; intellectual activity was vigorous among the leaders; the people at large enjoyed a mental and spiritual life; but nothing of literary permanence was produced.

The writers of the first generations born upon the soil, whose books characterise the scattered communities then conglomerating into groups of colonies along the seaboard in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, departed but slightly from the pattern set by their fathers. The north-eastern colonies, and, in particular, those of New England, were the chief, and, in fact, almost the exclusive sources of such literature as there was. Sermons and writings of a cognate kind made up its bulk; annals and personal narratives of all sorts gave way to books of a more formal historical nature dealing with the colonial past and the relations of the people with the Indians and the home Government; meagre scientific observations were recorded; but of polite literature there was at best only a small product, and that consisted of the most feeble, awkward, and inane imitation of the reigning English schools. Touches of originality have been sought for in the way of looking at things disclosed by observers of manners, but such traces of a rising American spirit are practically imperceptible; or if a subtle analysis seems to find them, they are unimportant

in the general mass. Tradition governed the form and substance of all that was written; the matter and method of the Puritan mind constituted the main stream; originality-a new life-stirred only in the secular and political fields, and there did not at once find literary expression. Men rather than books are the landmarks of the time to the eye of memory; titles are but the shadows of personalities, and these are memorable rather as high-water marks of certain Puritan forces in the region of character than for the value of what they bequeathed by their pens.

In the earlier part of the period under review, during which the ecclesiastical mind remained dominant, two names only definitely survive— Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Mather, the third of the name, represents the consummation of the elder conservative Puritan clergy, and his great work, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), is the chief monument of the seventeenthcentury New England which it records, as well as the most important literary achievement of the New World up to that time. Its author was prepared for this and his other labours by heredity. His grandfather, Richard Mather, was a jointauthor, with Thomas Welde and John Eliot, the translator of the Indian Bible, of the Bay Psalm Book. His father, Increase Mather, a graduate of Harvard and of Trinity College, Dublin, and President of Harvard, is credited with one hundred and thirty-six titles, of which the major part was, of course, sermons; but he is historically remembered as the forerunner of Franklin in representing the colonies at London, where he secured the new charter, and also as the head, though not without strenuous and successful opposition, of the clerical hierarchy of New England. In succession to him Cotton Mather took the post of the conservator of the old ways, but in his time the power of the clergy was already weakened, and he was less powerful in the State than his father had been, though he was more highly distinguished as a writer and also as an ascetic and visionary saint of his caste. Jonathan Edwards in the next generation shows the onward course of time by the fact that he dealt not at all with affairs, but retiring into the intellectual sphere of dogmatic theology, won lasting fame as a metaphysical schoolman applying the logic of the reason with marvellous efficiency to the matter of Calvinism,

and carrying that particular theory of God's nature and ways to the final stage of its development. His reputation for intellectual force has never failed to be recognised, and is now widespread ; but it is the faculty, and not its fruits in thought, that is admired.

Apart from these two celebrated men, one the example of the contents and the other of the power of the Puritan mind in the colonies, the literary works of the early eighteenth century have no more than parochial value, and they are without interest except for the antiquarian reader. A very human picture of life in the community about Massachusetts Bay is contained in Samuel Sewall's Diary (published only in 1878-82), of especial importance for the time of the witchcraft delusion at Salem, in which he bore a prominent part; he is also historically remembered as the author of the first anti-slavery tract, The Selling of Joseph (1700). He was Chief-Justice of Massachusetts, and of the highest layman type of character, with curious foibles of human nature about him, and a touch of poetic susceptibility to the beauty of nature rarely to be found in that age. A document hardly inferior to The Day of Doom in its revelation of the everyday religious state of mind of the Puritan people is The New England Primer, which from about the year 1690 was for a century and a half current in New England households, and for the greater part of that time dominant in the teaching of the young. Its contents varied in successive editions, but its substance remained unimpaired through all changes. It was known among its readers as the 'Little Bible.' The natural democracy of New England, which was so inbred that it was lodged even in the heart of the autocratic clergy, found its most significant expression in the writings of John Wise, a neighbour of Sewall's, the pastor of Chebacco, an opponent of the Mathers. His Vindication of the Government of New England Churches (1717), together with other works, contained principles and declarations in which the political thought of the Revolution could be heard labouring up the horizon; he was perhaps the chief precursor of the students of government. History, to which the founders, Bradford and Winthrop, had given just attention, was cultivated for Massachusetts Bay by William Hubbard, and more conspicuously by Thomas Prince, and later by the last of the royal governors, Thomas Hutchinson; and in Virginia by Robert Beverly and William Stith. Virginia also produced a gentleman of broad culture in William Byrd, a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose writings, illustrative of life and affairs in that colony, have been recently collected; but, like Daniel Denton's Brief Description of New York (1670) and George Alsop's Character of the Province of Maryland (1666), they appeal only to students of colonial life. In New England similar books were produced in plenty. A vein of satire, as thin as that of belleslettres, both so insignificant as to leave neither

author nor title worthy of mention, is noticeable; nor, indeed, had satire ever been wholly silent under the theocracy from the time of Morton of Merrymount. These various intellectual activities, in the regions of observation, chronicle, political thought, and illustration of times and manners, exhaust the minor history of the literature of the colonists up to the time when secular interests displaced theology and the religious life as the dominant elements of society, a change coincident with the emergence of the name of Benjamin Franklin as the typical American of the age.

Franklin, the foremost man of his people and the first American to obtain international fame, was born in Boston; but on his early removal to Philadelphia he found an environment better fitted to his own temperament, and also a centre more characteristic of the growing common life of the colonies. The power of the clergy in New England had become relaxed, but it was still strong, and the life for which they stood survived their personal status and privilege. The high moral strain, which, originally planted there, had been sedulously fostered, became a permanent trait of those communities; but in the middle colonies, and in those to the south also, the human characteristics which would naturally flourish most abundantly in response to the opportunities of a vigorous race in a new country had a freer course of development. Commercialism and the worldly spirit, the materialism of a burgher class, the vanities of new riches, were all rampant about Massachusetts Bay, and went to the making of the Tories as a class; but the temper of the things of this world and the lovers of them were much held in check by what in those days were the things of the spirit and their servants. The neighbourhood of Harvard College operated, together with its tradition, as a restraint on the new worldliness, and as a refuge and foster. ing-place of the older types; the New England communities would be slowly secularised, and would always bear traces of their origin as plantations of God for conscience' sake in the wilderness. The middle colonies were without this past; they had flourished and were prosperous; life in them was more frankly an enjoyment of the present good; and though Quakerism was at the root of Philadelphia, it has never disclosed any incompatibility with commercialism in any of its forms of the acquisition of wealth by prudence. Franklin's world was one well within the limits of the present life; his wisdom was thrift, an eye to the main chance, a yielding to the will of social circumstance and human nature, a compromise with things, an abandonment of those ideal rigours of the spirit which in the earlier New England were esteemed the first necessities. The centre of life for him had definitely swung back into the world that is, with its prizes and pleasures. Common-sense was the law and the prophets; and his intelligence was so enlightened, so broad, so quick in apprehension and catholic in sympathy, so superb in curiosity,

that in him the whole eighteenth-century spirit seemed to come at a birth in a form of marvellous mental freedom and practical material efficiency. Being all this by native genius, he found in his environment just the world in which such qualities would shine with most illumination. He was fed from the beginning on books and printed matter, and his main business was producing more of the same sort and disseminating it. The list of his own imprints is a principal index to the reading of his compatriots, like the catalogue of the library he founded, whose exemplary influence has been so great in providing public reading for a whole nation. He fertilised the community with reading matter and the spirit of reading; he was a vast promoter of book-power, if one may use the phrase, in the new country. The sort of reading that he made prevail, too, was of the prudent, matter-of-fact, scientific, encyclopædic kind: information for the mind, maxims for the conduct. In the two books by which he is remembered in his own right, the Autobiography (1817) and Poor Richard's Almanack (1733), the character of the man and of his counsel for life are plainly set forth. His position and labours, however, are something more and other than his books. His is one of the illustrious names of the world, and his place in American literature is only a small incident of his fame. The coincidence of such a supreme intelligence with that moment when the worldly interests of a young nation first came to the fore in its own consciousness, and became the goal of its intense effort, makes Franklin's American greatness, and his long life enabled him to foster the play of those consolidating forces of which at their climax of danger he was to be so great a servant in the eye of the world.

The secular spirit of the colonies, of which Franklin was the conspicuous representative, belonged to all of them in a greater or less degree, and was developed out of their material interests, rapidly increasing; it prepared the diverse settlements for the federating impulses preceding the Revolution, and facilitated the imperfect union of the first stage of independence. It left slight traces in literature. Only when the struggle had fairly begun, and principles and policies were necessarily declared and the cause pleaded in the public forum of church and newspaper and pamphlet, did the colonial power of literary expression again become vigorously alive. Sermons on the topics of the Revolution were innumerable everywhere; and the secular press was busily employed by the pens of laymen. Lawyers naturally took a leading part in the discussion. The spring of the Revolution has been found in the maintenance of old English rights, in the absorption of French philosophical generalisations, and in the habit of the transplanted law to resort to broad principles in establishing the new customs of the country. Whether or not these were all co-operating causes, in any aspect of the matter legal

thinkers would have the first place in the literature of the Revolution. A brief and distinguished era of political writing resulted. Its most shining name is Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence is its great State-paper. But, just as in Franklin's case, Jefferson's place in literature is an incident only in a much larger career that belonged to him as a man of affairs, whose utilitarian social services were various and important over and above his work as a lifelong statesman. Jefferson's writings, apart from the Declaration, have no element of literary greatness. The Constitution gave birth to the one book of power in the same field, The Federalist (1788), the work of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, a treatise in which the essentials of free government are memorably handled. It is customary for the American mind, at least, to add to these prized and celebrated documents Washington's Inaugurals (1789–93) and Farewell Address (1796). The political writings of the period also include speeches and pamphlets of the patriots James Otis, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, and Thomas Paine (Vol. II. p. 559). The period was one of great distinction for oratory, rhetoric, and thought, as well as for the remarkable persons who were engaged in the conduct of its affairs.

The titles of polite literature that survive by courtesy from the eighteenth century are certainly more substantial than those that illustrate the sterility of the ecclesiastical era in New England. The first place is held by Philip Freneau, a patriot in whose verse revolutionary sentiment and incident are embalmed in his British Prison-ship (1781), and in several brief pieces which, together with poems of a more conventional inspiration, appeared in two volumes (1786-88), forming the most considerable poetic work then done in America. The abundant source of the verse of the period, however, was Yale College, from whose young graduates issued John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1782), a revolutionary satire in imitation of Hudibras; Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan (1785), an artificial epic; and Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787), afterwards elaborated into The Columbiad. These aspirants for the large honours of the poetic art are known as the Hartford wits, though the name more properly belongs to the young men of still inferior literary talent who drew about them. These were the beginnings of American verse; in them the presence of the national spirit is plain, whose most striking manifestation, however, was the popular song, "Hail, Columbia!' (1798), the work of Joseph Hopkinson. In prose, John Woolman's Journal (1774)

stands alone.

The foregoing sketch of the fortune of literature in the American colonies, though brief, is abundant for its meagre material. Literature in a true sense did not exist in the first two centuries of life there. A few sporadic books cannot assume that title; and the interest of these, the Magnalia,

Franklin's Autobiography, Woolman's Journal, is not literary. The printed word was used as a social instrument with great power, but not for literary ends; it was in the service of theology, history, government, the practical or pious life; it was primarily speculative, religious, legal, employed for discussion and record. There was no literary class, nor any room for one, in the scheme of life; there was no market for their works. Yet the community, especially in the north, was a lettered one : it read much; it had school and college and a learned class; it maintained and continued high respect for the intellectual and scholarly life and the power of the mind. Its leaders had the classics of learning, which they knew thoroughly, and the urban literature of England, and later of France, for their leisure; its people had, in New England especially, the Bible, their one great book. The rise of a literature of high, if not the first, rank in the next century is not surprising; but such a literature was impossible in the preceding conditions of the colonies, north or south. The intellectual history of the colonies, ecclesiastical and governmental, is summed up in a few notable figures.

For the whole period of colonial literature, Stedman's Library of American Literature (11 vols. 1888-90) is invaluable because of the variety and fullness of the illustrations there contained, and the excellent judgment shown in the selection. Trent's Colonial Prose and Poetry (3 vols. 1901) is a handy small cyclopædia, and in his American Literature (1903) the authors and their works are treated with thoroughness and justice. Tyler's History of American Literature, 1607-1765 (2 vols. 1878), and Literary History of the American Revolution (2 vols. 1897) are still the best authorities on the whole subject-matter. G. E. WOODBERRY.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), born at Boston, son of Increase Mather and grandson of the celebrated Puritan minister, John Cotton, was the most distinguished clerical writer of his time, and the head of the conservative party in the Church. He was precocious as a child, a graduate of Harvard at the age of fifteen, and co-pastor with his father at the North Church, where he remained through life. He had extraordinary capacity for mental labour, was indefatigably industrious, and acquired immense erudition. He was gifted also with extraordinary curiosity, and is found exerting himself in unusual fields. His range is indicated by the contrasted facts that he was a chief persecutor of the witches and also an early advocate of the practice of inoculation for the smallpox. In private life he was an ascetic, gave himself to fasting and similar exercises of the religious rule, and saw visions. He appears to have spent no inconsiderable fraction of his time prostrated upon the floor of his study. His fruitfulness was prodigious even for those days, and nigh four hundred titles are credited to him. Of these the Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from its First Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698, is the chief. It is an immense work of many hundred pages, and contains the history of the settlement, the lives of the governors, the lives of sixty famous divines, the

history of Harvard College, creeds, disciplines remarkable providences, wars with the devil in many forms of sectarianism, and much other like multifarious matter. The work, with all its necessary defects, is an invaluable illustration of colonial life and thought. Other important works are Late Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possession (1689), The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), Parentator (1724, and the Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726). The traits of his writing are described by Tyler as 'the expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase.' The same authority describes him as in character 'a person whose intellectual endowments were quite remarkable, but inflated and perverted by egotism; himself imposed upon by his own moral affectations; completely surrendered to spiritual artifice; stretched, every instant of his life, on the rack of ostentatious exertion, intellectual and religious, and all this partly for vanity's sake, partly for conscience' sake.' He, nevertheless, filled a great place in the world that knew him; he was in correspondence with many persons of distinction abroad, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He failed of the presidency of Harvard College, and the fact showed that he belonged to the dying past which he embodied in both his own spirit and his works.

The Design of the 'Magnalia.'

I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depravations of Europe to the American strand: and, assisted by the Holy Author of that religion, I do, with all conscience of truth required therein by Him, who is the truth itself, report the wonderful displays of His infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian wilderness.

I relate the considerable matters that produced and attended the first settlement of colonies which have been renowned for the degree of reformation professed and attained by evangelical churches erected in those ends of the earth and a field being thus prepared, I proceed unto a relation of the considerable matters which have been acted thereupon.

I first introduce the actors that have, in a more exemplary manner, served those colonies; and give remarkable occurrences in the exemplary lives of many magistrates, and of more ministers, who so lived as to leave unto posterity examples worthy of everlasting remembrance.

I add hereunto the notables of the only Protestant University that ever shone in that hemisphere of the New World; with particular instances of Criolians, in our biography, provoking the whole world with virtuous objects of emulation.

I introduce, then, the actions of a more eminent im portance that have signalized those colonies: whether the establishments, directed by their synods, with a rich variety of synodical and ecclesiastical determinations; or,

the disturbances with which they have been from all sorts of temptations and enemies tempestuated, and the methods by which they have still weathered out each horrible tempest.

And into the midst of these actions I interpose an entire book, wherein there is, with all possible veracity, a collection made of memorable occurrences and amazing judgments and mercies befalling many particular persons among the people of New England.

Let my readers expect all that I have promised them in this bill of fare, and it may be that they will find themselves entertained with yet many other passages, above and beyond their expectations, deserving likewise a room in history: in all which there will be nothing but the author's too mean way of preparing so great entertainments, to reproach the invitation.

(From Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702.)

His Father's Manner of Life.

The Dr still had many opportunities for special service continued unto him, and he approved himself a prudent and faithful steward of his talents. He grew in the exercises of repentance and of patience, and of all piety and communion with God, and in the painful discharge of his ministry, and watchfully laid hold on all opportunities to bear testimonies for the cause of God, and of his people, as the matter might require. But if I cut the chapter into little sections, it may add something to the relish of it.

His purpose and manner of life is exactly described in a book about holiness which was written by him twenty years before he died. In that book he offers admirable rules for growth towards a perfection of holiness, in the fear of God: Which he introduces with saying, I shall not set before you directions impossible to be followed, or heavy burdens which I would be loth myself to touch. No; we saw his rules livelily exemplified. But his daily course may be inquired after. Besides his patient continuance in that stroke of well-doing which lay in his course of setting apart whole days for the religion of the closet, and which he continued until the last year of his life was coming on, his daily course was this: And what a grateful spectacle to angels in it!

In the morning repairing to his study (where his custom was to sit up very late, even until midnight and perhaps after it), he deliberately read a chapter, and made a prayer and then plied what of reading and writing he had before him. At nine o'clock he came down, and read a chapter and made a prayer, with his family. He then returned unto the work of the study. Coming down to dinner, he quickly went up again, and began the afternoon with another prayer. There he went on with the work of the study till the evening. Then with another prayer he again went unto his Father; after which he did more at the work of the study. At nine o'clock he came down to his family sacrifices. Then he went up again to the work of the study, which anon he concluded with another prayer; And so he betook himself unto his repose.

In the prayers of the day, what there fell short of the number in the hundred and sixty fourth verse of the hundred and nineteenth psalm was doubtless made up with numberless ejaculations-Of such ejaculatory prayers, no doubt, is to be understood, what antiquity reports of the apostle Bartholomew, That he prayed one hundred times in a day; and of one Paulus, That he

Idid it three hundred times. I can't say, That this our Eusebius had so many ejaculatory prayers as these come to; But he was the happy man, that had his quiver full of them!

He commonly spent sixteen hours of the four-andtwenty in his laborious hive! Being very much of Thomas à Kempis his mind, Nusquam requiem invenio nisi in libro et in claustro. He was there, some thought, even to a fault. More of his pastoral visits

were wished for.

(From Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and the Death of the ever-memorable Dr Increase Mather, 1724.)

See Tyler's History of American Literature (1878) and A. P. Marvin's Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1892). The most sympathetic and able study of him is Barrett Wendell's Cotton Mather, the Puritan Priest (1891). The Magnalia can be found in modern reprints.

G. E. W.

Jonathan Edwards (1702-58) was born at East Windsor, Connecticut. His boyhood was remarkable for precocity, shown not only in metaphysical interest but in physical research; and the mind which so announced itself has been deemed capable of greatness in any intellectual career he might have chosen. He was a graduate of Yale College, and then a tutor there, but spent his life as pastor of the church at Northampton from 1727 to 1750, and for eight years thereafter as missionary to the Indians near Stockbridge; after which he held for a few weeks the presidency of Princeton, in which office he died of the smallpox. His moral and spiritual character was on a plane equal to his mental endowments; though he was not an orator, he was an impressive speaker, and succeeded by the intensity of his nature perhaps as much as by the terror of his subject. His power of logical thought, however, surpassed his talent for description, minute and imaginative as the latter was; and the works on which his great reputation as the ablest American theologian rests are distinguished by reasoning only. His three important works are Treatise concerning the Religious Affections (1746), On the Freedom of the Will (1754), Treatise on Original Sin (1758). His most famous sermon is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741). The first extract illustrates the vivid directness of his sermons, the second his metaphysical style.

The Wrath of the Almighty.

Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you continue in it; the infinite might, and majesty, and terriblenes of the Omnipotent God shall be magnified upon you in the ineffable strength of your torments: you shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and when you shall be in this state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is; and when they have seen it, they will fall down and adore that great power and majesty. And it shall come to pass, that from one moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of