resist the claims of the French. But the more direct causes were the various measures passed by Parliament for the taxation of the colonies, from the Importation Act of 1733 to the Stamp Act of 1765. Some of the earliest and bitterest opposition came from Massachusetts, where, in 1761, we find the oratory of James Otis inciting among the people hints of resistance by arms. Fourteen years later, too, the first armed resistance came from Massachusetts. But the movement centralized farther south. In 1765 the young mountaineer Patrick Henry startled the Virginia House of Burgesses with his resolutions against British taxation. The First Colonial Congress met in 1765 at New York, the Second in 1774 at Philadelphia; the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia; the man chosen for commander-in-chief of the army and destined to become first President of the Union was a Virginian. The literature of the time might be expected to follow the course of these events, and in large measure it does. But this period, like the century and a half that had gone before, was not fruitful of good literature. For the most part it produced only the fleeting record of its own immediate concerns, in the form of revolutionary speeches, state documents, patriotic songs. These are all sincere enough and touch some of the noblest passions of humanity, but they lack art; and it takes art as well as sincerity to make any work lasting. The calm, the impartiality, the sense of perspective which art requires, are not at the command of one who celebrates contemporary events. Franklin in his old age could write with masterly skill the story of his youth, but not even Franklin, granting him the poetic powers which he lacked, could have fitly sung our nation's birth. It was reserved for Hawthorne, in the nineteenth century, to transfer Puritanism from history to literature, and our romancers are only just beginning to busy themselves seriously with our revolutionary age. ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE It would be idle to review at length the oratory of the period, or to single out the merits of this or that orator, from James Otis of Massachusetts, whom John Adams likened to a "flame of fire," to Patrick Henry of Virginia, who spoke, thought Jefferson, "as Homer wrote." These men spoke for their time, and not ineffectually; and their speeches, devoutly preserved, fired the youthful patriotism of several generations and served as models to orators whose fame has since partially eclipsed their own. But we scarcely revert to their speeches now. If we do, we find them often painfully "academic"; the ideas are couched in stately and pompous phrase-long, balanced sentences, resonant, Latinized diction, elaborate figures. We half fancy the orators must have been cold and unimpassioned weighers of words and polishers of periods. It was not so. Their style was the only style taught and approved in their day. Precisely such oratory was to be expected of an age which in England elevated almost to the position of a literary dictator Samuel Johnson. Yet a few of the words then uttered echo still. We shall be slow indeed to forget that cry of Patrick Henry, the most gifted, least academic speaker of them all— that cry which is the largest and deepest expression of the spirit of the age: "Give me liberty or give me death.' But our Revolution brought forth no Edmund Burke, eloquent, cultured, and profound, to measure himself with Demosthenes and Cicero of old. With the noble Farewell Address of Washington in 1796, the old issues were fairly closed. Daniel Webster, our greatest orator, belongs wholly to another era. On the documentary side the literature was good, as such literature goes. The Declaration of Independence easily takes rank with the great state papers of history, not alone because of its political significance but also because of its lofty theme and its earnest and dignified expression. It was composed, of course, with the im Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826. mediate object of making a wide popular appeal,—“a kind of war-song" says Professor Tyler, -and it was but natural that it should contain some "glittering generalities" and that its eloquence should approach grandiloquence. But it has stood a long and severe test, and stood it well; and no one, whether in youth or age, can read it to-day without some stir of emotion. To Thomas Jefferson belongs the chief credit of composing it, and Jefferson was a writer of considerable ability. His Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, attracted contemporary attention in England, where it was republished by Edmund Burke. Moreover his voluminous and scholarly letters, which make up the bulk of his collected works, give him a respectable rank among writers of a class of literature that has been much neglected since his day. Thomas Paine, 1737-1809. of A most picturesque figure of this period, and one closely associated in ideas with Jefferson, was Thomas Paine, an Englishman who came to America in 1774, at the age thirty-seven. He had neither the solid attainments nor the cultivated tastes of Jefferson, but he had all of Jefferson's radicalism and was utterly fearless in parading it. Jefferson had written on the Rights of America. Paine wrote later, in England, on the Rights of Man. He was an open sceptic and scoffer, at war generally with the established order of things. Such a revolutionary spirit belongs to no land, and when the American cause was won, Paine followed the torch of revolution to France, declaring, "Where Liberty is not, there is my home. After spending a considerable time there and in England he returned to America, where he died in 1809. On the whole, Thomas Paine has been too persistently remembered for his violence and his so-called atheism, too little for his naturally humane instincts. His coarse and superficial Age of Reason may well be neglected. Besides, that book, like the Rights of Man, was not written in America. What Americans should remember him for are his 'seventy-six pamphlet, Common Sense, which may have turned the tide of popular sentiment toward independence, and the series of tracts, entitled The Crisis, which he published through the long and terrible struggle that followed. Common Sense was said to have been worth an army of twenty thousand men to the American cause, while the sixteen successive numbers of The Crisis, widely distributed among the soldiers, did priceless service in keeping alive their patriotism through the darkest hours of Long Island and Valley Forge. It was in Common Sense that Paine called George the Third the "royal brute of Britain," and it was the first number of The Crisis that opened with the still famous sentence, "These are the times that try men's souls." "The Federalist." Conspicuous among the statesmen who stood in opposition to the extreme democratic views of men like Jefferson, were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. While the adoption of the Constitution was still in debate and strongly opposed by the "Staterights" theorists, these men ably supported it in a series of eighty-five papers published anonymously in a New York journal and issued collectively in 1788 under the title of The Federalist. The papers are political essays of a high type, broad in principle, sound in argument, and stately in style, and are well worth the study of those who would cultivate that kind of writing. POETRY The verse of the period, like the prose, rarely succeeded in detaching itself from current events; that is to say, its inspiration was fitful and its aims were immediate and practical rather than ultimate and artistic. Patriotic songs and ballads, satires, squibs for the corners of Yankee Doodle, of Songs and newspapers, were the staple verse products. somewhat obscure origin, sprang then into a popularity that has Even then, waned only with the elevation of popular taste. it was carried chiefly by its air, and belongs rather to music than to literature. Music and patriotism together carried many a song of slender literary merits, such as Timothy Dwight's hymn, Columbia, Columbia, to Glory Arise, composed while its author was chaplain in the army during the campaign against Burgoyne in 1777, and Joseph Hopkinson's Hail Columbia, first sung at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1798, to the popular air of "President's March." In 1775, 1776 John Trumbull, a Connecticut lawyer, published a burlesque epic with the title of M'Fingal, which he expanded into four cantos in 1782. It was a vigorous satire upon the Tories, and proved a powerful support to the Revolution in that divided age, running to thirty editions. In outward form it was modelled pretty closely after Butler's Hudibras, the famous English satire upon the Puritans. Bombast, coarse wit, a lilting measure, and bad double rhymes are almost necessary ingredients of a poem whose hero, Squire M'Fingal, "the vilest Tory in the town," is tried, condemned, tied to a pole, tarred, and subjected to a shower of down until "Not Milton's six-wing'd angel gathers Unquestionably the best ballad of the time that has come down to us is an anonymous production, Hale in the Bush, composed in memory of the fate of young Nathan Hale, who was executed as a spy in September, 1776: "The breezes went steadily through the tall pines, As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse, For Hale in the bush, for Hale in the bush.” The haunting quality of this opening stanza will be readily felt, and the entire poem is much superior to the earliest recorded and once famous American ballad of Lovewell's Fight (composed |