=English Influences on American Letters.=--Springing from a common stock, the two branches of eighteenth-century English literature showed many similarities. The charge of imitation and even of plagiarism has been brought against the American writers of that period; but it seems in no way unsafe to point to the single origin as the probable cause of the same characteristics appearing in the literature produced here, and that produced in the mother-country. No one can deny, of course, that not a few of our authors went to school to Englishmen, but the assertion that America until recently has produced nothing but pinchbeck literature is as false as it is absurd. That like produces like may be a trite saying, but its frequent repetition does not impair its truth. The English mind, whether expressing itself at home or in the colonies, naturally put forth the same kind of shoots: that their development was not in all respects equally rapid, that in time they became so much unlike as to appear unrelated, can be traced, no doubt, to the unsheltered fortune of the American scion in early days, and to the complete removal of the slip from the parent stem in after-years. With this thought in mind, the most thorough-going American may admit, without apologetic reserve, that the essayists of eighteenth-century England have counterparts in Irving and certain of his contemporaries, and that those of a slightly later date have much in common with Emerson and Thoreau. Should one feel, however, that excusable pride is to be taken only in those authors who exhibit qualities indigenous to America, one may triumphantly mention Warner, and Lowell, and Margaret Fuller; for, although these essayists show the racial instinct of English writers, they are none the less emphatically American in thought, tone, and expression. In passing, it is perhaps well to notice that a large number of American writers have tried their hands at more than one form of literature. For this reason Irving is discussed as an essayist, although he might be placed with the humourists, or perhaps better still, with fiction-writers, since he has the right to dispute with Poe the claim to be regarded as the progenitor of the American short story. Again, Emerson, like George Eliot, felt that his fame would eventually rest upon his poetry, but his readers almost always think and speak of him as an essayist. Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier, on the other hand, are properly reviewed at large as poets, despite the fact that their prose work is not inconsiderable nor unimportant and must therefore receive some attention in even a rapid survey of the American essay.