It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of looking over whole boxes of Washington’s yet unprinted letters in the hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose curved and varied signatures we had the inexhaustible boyish pleasure of studying and comparing; as we had also that of enjoying the pithy wisdom of Franklin in his own handwriting a few years later (1840), in the hands of the same kind and neighborly editor. But it was not always recognized by those who grew up in the new-born nation that in the mother country itself a period of literary ebb tide was then prevailing. When Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a Federalist statesman, wrote the first really important essay on American Literature,—an essay published in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems to be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America had not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.” Believing as he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, Ames thought that perhaps, when liberty had given place to an emperor, this monarch might desire to see splendor in his court, and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the arts and sciences. At any rate, he maintained, “After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men of genius, who will be admired and imitated.” The first part of this prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite unexpected. II