Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as an elegant pastime. They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money. They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough exposition of their profound penetralia. It may be, too, that their assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously for a few pennies to keep soul and body together. And your Southern grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow. Their vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and the land, nature's own flower garden and man's inalienable heritage, brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season. Southern intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not profundity, was the passport to popularity. Hence, Southern hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen) became almost as proverbial in the _polite_ circles of America and Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the French. And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South, shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners. But the shadow alone remains; the substance has departed--"There are no birds in last year's nest." If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men--fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention--the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative. The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high literary effort. In the process of that demonstration, I am fully persuaded that the Anglo-African--with his brilliant wit and humor, his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for literary pursuits--will contribute largely to give the South an enviable and honorable position.