beyond this he was hardly ready to make many claims for our literature. I substantially agree with him in these expressions, though I would not stop with them. It is true, however, that American literature should stand firmly on its own ground, making no claims on the score of patriotism, or youth, or disadvantageous circumstances, or bizarre achievement, but gravely pointing to what has been done. It is better to offer to the world, self-respectingly and silently, Emerson, Longfellow, Motley, Bancroft, Irving, Ticknor, Poe, and Hawthorne, in their several works and ways. These stand for themselves; their place is assured, and we have no need to assert their claims with vociferousness or exaggeration.

If honest, searching, and dispassionate criticism of American literature is needed in considering the work and rank of authors of the present century,who have chiefly given that literature its place in the world's estimation,-it is no less needed in studying our writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. American literature in the colonial period was in its day of small things, promising indeed, but without great achievement. No small honor is to be paid, of course, to the pioneer in any department of work. It was, in a true sense, harder for Mrs. Bradstreet to be Mrs. Bradstreet than for Emerson to be Emerson. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were the direct precursors and the actual founders of most that is good in American letters. Those theological treatises and controversial sermons, those painstaking versions of the Psalms, and those faithful records of sight and experience were the index

fingers pointing to future triumphs. Bradford and Winthrop were the intellectual ancestors of Emerson and Hawthorne. Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards were giants in their day. Benjamin Franklin still remains one of the world's great helpful forces. Jefferson and the writers of the "Federalist" made great contributions to the political wisdom of the nations. But when all this has been said, does it not remain true that some critics have bestowed an unwarrantable amount of time and thought and adulation upon writers of humble rank and small influence, simply because they were early? John Smith, temporarily in America, wrote accounts of American scenes and peoples,-accounts more entertaining than trustworthy; he must be mentioned, but is he, therefore, our first writer? When there is a Central African literature in English, will Henry M. Stanley be reckoned one of its early lights? George Sandys translated Ovid in Virginia, and William Morrell made Latin verses in Massachusetts, both returning to the mother country; how did their experience and writings differ from those of other temporary residents in other foreign lands? English literature, from 1607 to 1776, passed from one brilliant period to another; the American colonies were in constant intellectual and personal communication with the old home. If we think of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, the seventeenth-century choir of lyrists, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Swift, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, and the eighteenthcentury novelists, what shall we say of the intrinsic literary worth of most of the books written on Amer

ican soil, by writers who inherited, or shared, the intellectual life of England?

In other words, why should writings which would have passed into obscurity in England be magnified beyond their deserts, merely because they were written on the American coast? We may be interested, as antiquarians, in the poor verses of Anne Bradstreet, Nathaniel Ward, Peter Folger, Michael Wigglesworth, and the Bay Psalmists; we may recognize the intellectual force of Richard and Increase Mather and Roger Williams; and we may laboriously describe the hundreds of sermons, the scores of treatises, the dozens of books of verse, which were printed by colonial writers; but we cannot eulogize them at length without a sad distortion of perspective. A few great names stand out, but only a few. For the purposes of comparative criticism, the student should know thoroughly William Bradford, John Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and the makers of the new nation from 1750 to 1790. The work of the rest he should recognize and praise in an adequate degree, but should not magnify beyond its deserts. The history of literature is one thing, bibliography is quite another thing. If a certain space be devoted to the colonial literature of America, then, on the same perspective, ten times as much is needed to bring the record down to our day. One should study the great men profoundly, and let the worthy sermonizers, and pamphleteers, and spinners of doggerel go free. Our forefathers were founding

a state on the basis of the town-meeting; they were spreading Christianity, as they understood it, with might and main; they were opening schools and creating a virtuous and manly public spirit; but for literature, as such, most of them cared little. They made literature possible, just as they made art possible; but they do not deserve, in the chronicles of literature and art, a disproportionate space.

I believe that the time has come for the student to consider American literature as calmly as he would consider the literature of another country, and under the same limitations of perspective. Some things we have not done at all; some we have done ill, some passably well, and some better than any other nation in the world. We can afford to recognize this fact and act upon it, Let us no longer praise an author because he is American, or because his booklet was printed in Boston or New York instead of London or Paris. We can afford to be self-respecting. It is the new city, the shoddy family, the growing literature, that is self-assertive. Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Motley, are all well able to take care of their own reputations. The development of Hawthorne's genius is to be studied as impartially as we study Dante, and in the same quiet way. And let us not give to John Norton, or Samuel Penhallow, or Mather Byles, or Robert Calef, or Nathaniel Morton, or Percival, or Mrs. Sigourney, time and thought which belong to greater and more lasting names.

Expository criticism of American literature must give way to philosophical criticism. Compendiums

and guides and selections have had their work to do. Faithful workers have hunted up, set in order, and described the older American books. We have had enough description; we want analysis. What has been and what is the environment of our literature? What have been the relations between cause and effect, between the Saxon mind in England and the Saxon mind in America? What have American writers thus far done, worthy to be mentioned beside Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, George Eliot, and all the great writers of this and previous centuries? What of our books are world's-books, and why? How and why have American writers succeeded and failed?

The pages which follow-imperfect in execution, but not, I hope, wholly false in method-are a modest endeavor to aid readers in answering these questions.