thusiasm. Soon, however, the revival took a turn at which the more conservative clergy were alarmed; in 1744 Harvard College formally protested against the excesses of Whitefield, and in 1745 Yale followed this example. The religious enthusiasm which possessed the lower classes of eighteenth-century America, in short, grotesquely outran the gravely passionate ecstasies of the immigrant Puritans. So late as Cotton Mather's time, the devout of New England were still rewarded with mystic visions, wherein divine voices and heavenly figures revealed themselves to prayerful keepers of fasts and vigils. The Great Awakening expressed itself in mad shoutings and tearing off of garments. The personal contrast between the immigrant Puritans and Whitefield typifies the difference. The old ministers had entered on their duties with all the authority of degrees from English universities; Whitefield began life as a potboy in a tavern. Yet the Great Awakening testifies to one lasting fact,—a far-reaching spontaneity and enthusiasm among the humbler classes of America, which, once aroused, could produce social phenomena much more startling than Methodism produced in King George II's England.

The people who had been so profoundly stirred by this Great Awakening were the same who in 1776 declared themselves independent of the mother country. The The Revo- American Revolution is important enough for separate

lution.

consideration. Before speaking of that, we had best consider the literary expression of America up to 1776. So, in this general consideration of history, we need only recall a few dates. The Stamp Act was passed in 1765, the year in which Blackstone published the first volume of his Commentaries on the Law of England. Lexington, Con

cord, and Bunker Hill came in 1775, the year in which Burke delivered his masterly speech on Conciliation with America. On the Fourth of July, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. American independence was finally acknowledged by the peace of 1783. The Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789. In 1800 the presidency of John Adams was drawing to a close, and Washington was dead. Now, very broadly speaking, the forces which expressed themselves in these familiar facts were forces which tended in America to destroy the fortunes of established and wealthy people, and to substitute as the ruling class throughout the country one more like that which had been stirred by the Great Awakening. In other words, the Revolution once more brought to the surface of American life the sort of natives whom the Great Awakening shows so fully to have preserved the spontaneity and the enthusiasm of earlier days.

ment of American

During the eighteenth century, in brief, America seems Developslowly to have been developing into an independent nationality as conservative of its traditions as England Nationality. was of hers, but less obviously so because American traditions were far less threatened. The geographical isolation of America combined with the absorptive power of our native race to preserve the general type of character which America had displayed from its settlement. In the history of native Americans, the seventeenth century has already defined itself as a period of inexperience. The fact that American conditions changed so little until the Revolution implies that this national inexperience persisted. In many superficial aspects, no doubt, the native Americans of 1776, particularly of the prosperous class,

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 Massachusetts-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