Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the mother country. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency to the _dicta_ of Great Britain. At last a revulsion of feeling, with self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into the opposite extreme. In throwing _totally_ off that “authority,” whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, “a national literature!”—as if any true literature _could be_ “national”—as if the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary _histrio_. We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest _partizans_ in letters. Our papers spoke of “tariffs” and “protection.” Our Magazines had habitual passages about that “truly native novelist, Mr. Cooper,” or that “staunch American genius, Mr. Paulding.” Unmindful of the spirit of the axioms that “a prophet has _no_ honor in his own land” and that “a hero is never a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_”—axioms founded in reason and in truth—our reviews urged the propriety—our booksellers the necessity, of strictly “American” themes. A foreign subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning nativity in the States; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of our own growth, and discussed our own affairs. It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it _is_ subsiding. Our views of literature in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use—to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism—to regard it more as an art based immoveably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-dictation of the bookseller-_coteries_. If our editors are not as yet _all_ independent of the will of a publisher, a majority of them scruple, at least, _to confess_ a subservience, and enter into no positive combinations against the minority who despise and discard it. And this is a _very_ great improvement of exceedingly late date.