worthy of a place beside them. But this is not matter for surprise; conditions in America, although improving, were still unfavorable. Along the frontier the contest with wild nature went on unceasingly; and within the area already settled, arose a new set of sinew-straining tasks the development of commerce and industry, the wars with France for the possession of Canada, and the struggle for independence and national union. Furthermore, from first to last the literature of the mother country retarded the growth of a native literature by diminishing the need of one; our ancestors imported poetry, essays, and novels from England just as they imported fine fabrics and other luxuries. Next to the inferiority of early American literature, the most conspicuous fact is its imitation of English models. Throughout its whole course it runs parallel with literature in the mother country, although usually lagging about a generation behind. In America as in England, the heavy prose of the seventeenth century is succeeded by lighter and more orderly prose in the eighteenth. The "metaphysical" poetry of the Jacobean and Caroline periods is solemnly echoed from the rocky New England coast. The didactic and satiric verse of Dryden and Pope feathers the shaft of the American satirist in regions which not long before knew only the whiz of the Indian's arrow. The profitable pleasantries of Addison, the pensive moralizing of Gray, the genial grace of Goldsmith, the ponderous sesquipedalian tread of Johnson, the new Romanticism of Collins, Macpherson, and Walpole, the "sensibility" of Mackenzie and Sterne, all find admirers and imitators in the colonial writers of verse and prose. I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD. (1607-1765.) EVENTS IN AMERICA. Settlement of Jamestown, 1607. Negro slavery introduced into Virginia, 1619. First settlement in North Carolina 1653. Persecution of Quakers, 1656-1661. Landing of Pilgrims at Plymouth, English seize New York, 1664. 1620. New York settled by Dutch, 1621. Indian massacre in Virginia, 1622. Founding of Charleston, S.C., 1670. King Philip's War, 1675-1678. Founding of Massachusetts Bay Salem witchcraft, 1692. The Bloodless Revolution, 1688. William and Mary came to throne, 1689. Reign of Anne, 1702-1714. England a commonwealth, 1649- Reign of George I., 1714-1727. 1660. Restoration of monarchy, 1660. Reign of George II., 1727-1760. LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. Shakspere, 1564-1616. 44 Cavalier" poets: Herrick, 15911674; Carew, 1598-1639; Suck ling, 1609-1641; Lovelace, 16181658. Great preachers: Taylor, 16131667; Barrow, 1630-1677; Tillot son, 1630-1694; South, 1633-1716. Pilgrim's Progress, 1678 and 1684 Dryden, 1631-1700. 1. LITERATURE IN VIRGINIA. For the beginnings of American literature we must go back nearly three centuries, to the time when a little band of Englishmen settled at Jamestown, Va., and erected a few rude huts on the edge of the primeval forest. Starvation, fever, Indians, and mismanagement soon threatened the very existence of the settlement, the horrors of the Starving Time slaying all but sixty out of a population of five hundred. Subsequently the colony grew and prospered. Yet toils and dangers abounded still. Forests must be felled, houses built, and new land brought under the plough. From time to time Indian massacres spread death and alarm. The political storms which shook the mother country in the middle of the century agitated the colony too. And a little later, Bacon's Rebellion threw Virginia itself into the fever of civil strife. Such conditions, when the energies of men are absorbed in the strenuous labors of the pioneer, do not conduce to the growth of the fine arts It is therefore no surprise to find that the literature of Virginia during these early years is comparatively meagre and poor. The writers were often unpractised, and had small leisure for the graces of style. But they wrote with the largeness and freedom and manly strength which were tharacteristic of the age; their pictures of peril by sea and land are powerful and graphic; and in their descrip. tions of the New World and its strange inhabitants is sometimes a vein of rich though artless poetry. Foremost in time among these early authors stands *Captain JOHN SMITH, a man of bold spirit and many adventures. He seems to have been given to boastfulness and romantic exaggeration; in particular, his story about his rescue by Pocahontas has been much questioned by modern historians. But his undoubted experiences in the New World were varied and often thrilling; and in his several books he describes them and the country with the same rough-and-ready spirit in which he journeyed and fought. WILLIAM STRACHEY still lives as a writer in his description of a storm at sea, which wrecked him and his company on their voyage to Virginia in 1609. His account, which it is thought may have suggested to Shakspere certain passages in The Tempest, is in places magnificent, full of the awful might of the ocean in wrath. Other writers of the same class may here be passed by. Not so with GEORGE SANDYS, the first poet upon Virginian soil, who there completed his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, during the troublous times of the Indian massacre in 1622. The authors mentioned thus far were Englishmen writing in or about America rather than Americans even in spirit. But in 1656 appeared a book by one who had come to love America as his home: "It is that Country in which I desire to spend the remnant of my dayes," writes JOHN 1 An author or work marked by an asterisk is represented among the extracts in Appendix, A. 2 For a fair statement of the case against it, see Doyle's English Colonies in America, Vol. I., Appendix E: for the other side, Fiske's Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, Vol. I., p. 103. For the names and works of some of them, see Appendix, C. HAMMOND in his Leah and Rachel;1 and he contrasts the simple plenty and new opportunities in America with the hopeless poverty in the crowded cities of the Old World. The stormy days of Bacon's Rebellion called forth a good deal of political literature, but it is of little general interest. The sudden death of the rebel leader, however, was the occasion of an anonymous elegy of some merit, ending with these dignified lines: Here let him rest; while wee this truth report Hee's gon from hence unto a higher Court To pleade his Cause: where he by this doth know Before the end of the century Virginia entered upon its colonial Golden Age. The Indians had been overawed. Wealth and population were increasing rapidly. Along the pleasant waterways stood the comfortable mansion-houses of the planters, slave-huts clustering near, and broad acres of woodland and tillage stretching away on every side. Yet, because of the dearth of cities, printing-presses, and schools, literature flourished no better than before. The Virginian gentleman, inheriting the tastes of the English country squire, preferred 1 Page 28, ed. 1656. 2 Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1866-1867, p. 324. The earliest extant original poem written in Virginia seems to have been John Grave's A Song of Sion, published in England in 1662. Grave was a Quaker, and his crude lines are full of righteous indignation over the recent persecution of his sect in America. The poem is not mentioned, so far as I know, in any history or cyclopædia of American literature. I am indebted to Mr. C. S. Brigham, of the Brown University Library, for calling my attention to the copy in the Harris Collection. 8 From the first the leading colonists of Virginia were " gentlemen "; and after the defeat of the king's party many Cavaliers, from the class of the landed gentry, sought refuge in the colony, the ancestors of Wash. ington and of other great Virginians being among them. |