II. The Novelists 115 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the English Language and Literature in Cornell University. III. The Poets 240 By LANE COOPER, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the English Language and Literature in Cornell University. IV. The Essayists and the Humorists 321 By ELMER JAMES BAILEY, A.M., Instructor in English in Cornell University. V. The Orators and the Divines 359 By LANE COOPER. VI. The Scientists 392 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP. VII. The Periodicals 434 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP. LIST OF AMERICAN AUTHORS IN THE TAUCHNITZ EDITION 455 INDEX. 457 By JOSEPH Q. ADAMS, JR., Ph.D., Instructor in English in Cornell University. Colonial Literature and The Literature of the Revolutionary Period A Manual of American Literature COLONIAL LITERATURE I. FIRST PERIOD (1607-1676) _The Beginning._--The present race of Americans who are of English lineage--that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion of the American people of to-day--are the direct descendants of the crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century. Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that century in which American civilisation had its planting; even as its training into some maturity and power has been the business of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most of the men who produced American literature during that period were immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture. Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply enter into the meaning of American literature in its later forms without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed, at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to