For the development among the Americans in 1776 of the robust political courage invoked by their new doctrine of national separation, it was necessary that the amiable note of provincialism--the filial obtuseness of the colonial mind--should be broken up, and that the Englishmen who lived in America should begin to find food for mirth and even for derision in the peculiarities of the Englishmen who lived in England. Toward this important political result, Hopkinson made some contribution in his so-called _Letter written by a Foreigner on the Character of the English Nation_. Under an old device for securing disinterested judgments on national peculiarities, Hopkinson here represents a cultivated foreigner as spending some time in England in the latter part of 1776, and as giving to a friend in his own country a cool but very satirical analysis of the alleged vices, foibles, and absurdities of the English people, and of the weak and wrong things in their treatment of their late colonists in America. From these character-sketches by the supposed foreigner in London in the year 1776--themselves by no means despicable for neat workmanship and for humorous power--it is not difficult to make out just how Hopkinson’s playful writings were adapted to the achievement of serious political results, as ridding colonial-minded Americans of the intellectual restraint imposed almost unconsciously by their old provincial awe of England, and helping them to subject the metropolitan race to caustic and even contemptuous handling, as a necessary condition of national free-mindedness and of bold dissent on questions of political authority and control.