English appeared to be men of the eighteenth century. In personal temper, however, Thomas Hutchinson and Samuel Adams were far more like John Winthrop and Roger Williams than Chatham and Burke were like Bacon and Lord Burleigh. One inference seems clear: the Americans of the revolutionary period retained to an incalculable degree qualities which had faded from ancestral England with the days of Queen Elizabeth. IV LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1700 TO 1776 REFERENCES GENERAL REFERENCES: On the general course of literature in America between 1700 and 1776, see Tyler; for selections, see Stedman and Hutchinson, Vol. II. PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS: See Isaiah Thomas, History of Printing in America, Worcester, 1810; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872, New York: Harper, 1873; Tyler, II, 301–306. WOOLMAN: Woolman's Journal, with an introduction by Whittier, Boston: Osgood, 1873; on Woolman in general, see Tyler, Lit. Hist. Am. Rev., Chapter xxxvii. HUTCHINSON: Of Hutchinson's History of the Colony of Massachu setts-Bay (Vol. I, Boston, 1764; Vol. II, Boston, 1767; Vol. III, London, 1828) the first two volumes have been out of print for over a century, the last edition having been published at Salem and Boston in 1795; the third volume is to be found only in the London edition of 1828. Hutchinson also published a Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, Boston, 1769. For biography, see P. O. Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1884–86; J. K. Hosmer, The Life of Thomas Hutchinson, Boston: Houghton, 1896. The late Charles Deane compiled a Hutchinson bibliography, which was privately printed at Boston in 1857; see also, on the bibliography of Hutchinson, Winsor's America, III, 344. As the material prosperity of America increased, it tended to develop the middle colonies; during the greater part of the eighteenth century the most important town in America was not Boston, but Philadelphia. And though in purely religious writing New England kept the lead, the centre of its religious thought had shifted from the shore of Massachusetts Bay to that of Long Island Sound. Growth of Colleges Some familiar dates in the history of American education emphasize these facts. Yale College, founded in New Eng- 1700, began its career under King William III, until Outside land. whose reign the only established school of higher learning in America had been Harvard College, founded under Charles I. The avowed purpose of the founding of Yale was to maintain the orthodox traditions threatened by the constantly growing liberalism of Harvard. Under George II, three considerable colleges were founded in the middle colonies. In 1746, Princeton College was established to maintain an orthodoxy as stout as that of Yale. In 1749, partly under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society which had lately been founded by Franklin, the University of Pennsylvania began an academic history which more than most in America has kept free from entanglement with dogma. In 1754, King's College, now Columbia University, was founded at New York. Meanwhile Harvard College had done little more than preserve its own prudently liberal traditions, with no marked alteration in either character or size. The higher intellectual activity of America was clearly tending for a while to centralize itself elsewhere than in those New England regions where the American intellect had first been active. These two changes, geographical and temperamental, may be shown by summarizing the titles of the chief American publications, as they are recorded in Whitcomb's Chronological Outlines of American Literature, during such typical periods as 1701-1705, 1731-1735, and 1761-1765. Between 1701 and 1705 Whitcomb mentions eighteen titles, of which fifteen-ten by the Mathers-belong in New England, one in the Middle States, and two in the South. Of these three publications outside New England, the only one which is now remembered is a History of the Present State of Virginia (1705) by ROBERT BEVERLEY (about 1675-1716). At this period, publication evidently centred in New England, and revealed the immense industry and influence of the Mathers. And all of Whitcomb's eighteen titles fall under our familiar headings of (1) Religious writings and (2) Historical writings. Middle Between 1731 and 1735 Whitcomb mentions twenty-nine titles, of which twenty-five are by known individual writers. Of these twenty-five titles, fourteen are from New England and eleven from the Middle and Southern States. Again, of these twenty-five titles, only fifteen can be brought under the headings of Religion and History, which we found to include nearly all the publications of Publicathe seventeenth century and of the first few years of the tion in the eighteenth. Among the writings between 1731 and 1735 Colonies. which are neither historical nor religious are several which cannot possibly be called literature, such as a book about the birds of the Carolinas, a spelling-book, and a Hebrew grammar. Among the remaining titles are Bachelors' Hall, an imitative poem in couplets, by GEORGE WEBB; Poor Richard's Almanac; FRANKLIN'S Essay on Human Vanity; and JAMES LOGAN'S Cato's Moral Distichs Englished in Couplets. These all came from Philadelphia. Between 1761 and 1765, Whitcomb mentions thirty-one titles of works by known individual writers; and these are almost exactly divided between New England and the Middle and Southern colonies. Religion and the old-fashioned kind of history include only nine; of those remaining, a few are scientific, and one is dramatic, but much the greater number-twelve-are, to quote the title Political of one of them, Considerations on Behalf of the Colonies. Some of this political writing is in verse; some of it takes the form of the periodical essay. Both essays and verse closely imitate earlier English work. These few titles show that New England, supreme at the beginning of the century, was giving place, as regards number of writers, literary feeling, and effort at purely literary forms, to the middle colonies. Again, as the century went on the concerns of the State began to seem more pressing than those of the Church. Especially the problem of independence from Great Britain forced itself upon writers and readers alike. The political writing which resulted often took the form of light satire, burlesque, or mock epic. Thus both the form and the substance of American writing in the middle of the century were less severe than had been the case earlier. We shall now look a little more closely at two or three phases of writing which illustrate this change. During the first half of the eighteenth century there had rapidly grown up in America a profusion of periodical publications. We had no Tatler, to be sure, or Spectator; but from 1704, when the Boston News Letter was esNewspapers tablished, we had a constantly increasing number of newsAlmanacs. papers. A dozen years before the Revolution these had and everywhere become as familiar and as popular as were those annual almanacs which had already sprung up in the seventeenth century, and of which the most highly developed example was Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. These indications of every-day reading show that the eighteenth century in America was a period of growing intellectual activity and curiosity among the whole people, |
