Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), the classmate at Princeton of James Madison and Philip Freneau, wrote “Modern Chivalry, or The Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant” (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, published in four parts, 1792-7), a modern “Don Quixote” narrating his experiences in the Whisky Insurrection of 1794. Though widely read in its day, especially by artisans and farmers, its literary worth was not sufficient to preserve it. “The Gamesters,” published in 1805 by Mrs. Catharine Warren, was likewise popular in its day; it attempted “to blend instruction with amusement.” _Charles Brockden Brown._--The history of the novel in America, therefore, properly begins with Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who has been called “the first professional man of letters and important creative writer of the English-speaking portion of the New World.” He was born in Philadelphia of a good Quaker family; just forty years earlier, his uncle, Charles Brockden, had drawn up the constitution of the old Philadelphia Library Company. From early childhood, books were familiar to the youthful Brown, who became an omnivorous reader, and at Robert Proud’s school undermined his health by excessive devotion to reading and study, so that he was always an invalid. He took up the study of law, but soon abandoned it, despite the protest of his family, for the career of “book-making.” After some writing of verse and of essays, he published in 1798 a successful novel, “Wieland, or The Transformation,” and at once followed this with five others, “Ormond, or The Secret Witness,” (1799), “Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793” (1799-1800), in which he gave an account of the ravages of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, “Edgar Huntly, or The Adventures of a Sleep-Walker,” “Clara Howard” (1801), and “Jane Talbot” (published in England in 1804). From 1798 till 1801, Brown lived amid congenial surroundings in New York; in the former year he nearly died of yellow fever, to which his friend Dr. Elihu H. Smith succumbed. Returning to Philadelphia in 1801, he spent the remainder of his life there; marrying happily in 1804, editing _The Literary Magazine_, and writing political pamphlets and works on geography and Roman history, until consumption brought his busy and useful life to a premature end.