social elegance made possible an appreciation of belles-lettres.

Far different was it in New England. There, as in the South, the population was homogeneous and English. But it was a Puritan population, of which the environment and the conditions of its life retarded, and at the same time deeply influenced, the evolution of its literature. One perceives a striking parallel between the early history of the people of New England and that of the people of ancient Rome. Each was forced to wrest a living from a rugged soil. Each dwelt in constant danger from formidable enemies. The Roman was ready at every moment to draw his sword for battle with Faliscans, Samnites, or Etruscans. The New Englander carried his musket with him even to the house of prayer, fearing the attack of Pequots or Narragansetts. The exploits of such half-mythical Roman heroes as Camillus and Cincinnatus find their analogue in the achievements credited to Miles Standish and the doughty Captain Church. Early Rome knew little of the older and more polished civilisation of Greece. New England was separated by vast distances from the richer life of Europe. In Rome, as in New England, religion was linked closely with all the forms of government; and it was a religion which appealed more strongly to men's sense of duty and to their fears, than to their softer feelings. The Roman gods needed as much propitiation as did the God of Jonathan Edwards. When a great calamity befell the Roman people, they saw in it the wrath of their divinities precisely as the true New Englander was taught to view it as a "providence." In both commonwealths, education of an elementary sort was deemed essential; but it was long before it reached the level of illumination.

Like influences yield like results. The Roman character, as moulded in the Republic's early years, was one of sternness and efficiency. It lacked gayety, warmth, and flexibility. And the New England character resembled it in all of these respects. The historic worthies of Old Rome would have been very much at ease in early Massachusetts. Cato the Censor could have hobnobbed with old Josiah Quincy, for they were temperamentally as like as two peas. It is only the Romans of the Empire who would have felt out of place in a New England environment. Horace might conceivably have found a smiling angulus terrarum somewhere on the lower Hudson, but he would have pined away beside the Nashua; while to Ovid, Beacon Street would have seemed as ghastly as the frozen slopes of Tomi. And when we compare the native period of Roman literature with the early years of New England's literary history, the parallel becomes more striking still. In New England, as in Rome, beneath all the forms of a self-governing and republican State, there existed a genuine aristocracy whose prestige was based on public service of some sort; and in New England, as in Rome, public service had in it a theocratic element. In civil life, the most honourable occupation for a free citizen was to share in this public service. Hence, the disciplines which had a direct relation to government were the only civic disciplines to be held in high consideration. Such an attitude profoundly affected the earliest attempts at literature. The two literary or semi-literary pursuits which have a close relation to statesmanship are oratory and history—oratory, which is the statesman's instrument, and history, which is in part the record of his achievements. Therefore, at Rome, a line of native orators arose before a native poet won a hearing, and therefore, too, the annalists and chroniclers precede the dramatists.

In New England it was much the same. Almost from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, there were men among the colonists who wrote down with diffusive dulness the records of whatever they had seen and suffered. Governor William Bradford composed a history of New England; and Thomas Prince, minister of the Old South Church, compiled another work of like title, described by its author as told "in the Form of Annals." Hutchinson prepared a history of Massachusetts Bay; and many others had collected local traditions, which seemed to them of great moment, and had preserved them in books, or else in manuscripts which were long afterwards to be published by zealous antiquarians. Cotton Mather's curious Magnalia, printed in 1700, was intended by its author to be history, though strictly speaking it is theological and is clogged with inappropriate learning,—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The parallel between early Rome and early Massachusetts breaks down, however, when we consider the natural temperament of the two peoples as distinct from that which external circumstances cultivated in them. Underneath the sternness and severity which were the fruits of Puritanism, there existed in the New England character a touch of spirituality, of idealism, and of imagination such as were always foreign to the Romans. Under the repression of a grim theocracy, New England idealism still found its necessary outlet in more than one strange form. We can trace it in the hot religious eloquence of Edwards even better than in the imitative poetry of Mrs. Bradstreet. It is to be found even in such strange panics as that which shrieked for the slaying of the Salem "witches." Time alone was needed to bring tolerance and intellectual freedom, and with them a freer choice of literary themes and moods. The New England temper remained, and still remains, a serious one; yet ultimately it was to find expression in forms no longer harsh and rigid, but modelled upon the finer lines of truth and beauty.

The development was a gradual one. The New England spirit still exacted sober subjects of its writers. And so the first evolution of New England literature took place along the path of historical composition. The subjects were still local or, at the most, national; but there was a steady drift away from the annalistic method to one which partook of conscious art. In the writings of Jared Sparks there is seen imperfectly the scientific spirit, entirely self-developed and self-trained. His laborious collections of historical material, and his dry but accurate biographies, mark a distinct advance beyond his predecessors. Here, at least, are historical scholarship and, in the main, a conscientious scrupulosity in documentation. It is true that Sparks was charged, and not quite unjustly, with garbling some of the material which he preserved; yet, on the whole, one sees in him the founder of a school of American historians. What he wrote was history, if it was not literature. George Bancroft, his contemporary, wrote history, and was believed for a time to have written it in literary form. To-day his six huge volumes, which occupied him fifty years in writing, and which bring the reader only to the inauguration of Washington, make but slight appeal to a cultivated taste. The work is at once too ponderous and too rhetorical. Still, in its way, it marks another step.

Up to this time, however, American historians were writing only for a restricted public. They had not won a hearing beyond the country whose early history they told. Their themes possessed as yet no interest for foreign nations, where the feeble American Republic was little known and little noticed. The republican experiment was still a doubtful one, and there was nothing in the somewhat paltry incidents of its early years to rivet the attention of the other hemisphere. "America" was a convenient term to denote an indefinite expanse of territory somewhere beyond seas. A London bishop could write to a clergyman in New York and ask him for details about the work of a missionary in Newfoundland without suspecting the request to be absurd. The British War Office could believe the river Bronx a mighty stream, the crossing of which was full of strategic possibilities. As for the American people, they interested Europe about as much as did the Boers in the days of the early treks. Even so acute an observer as Talleyrand, after