which had charmed the ear and cheated the memory of Scott (I think it was) till he mistook it for his own. We had the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and two or three naval ballads which, to my ear, have the true rough and ready tone. Philip Cook, of Virginia, had written a few graceful and musical lyrics. We had ‘McFingal,’ as near its model as any imitation of the inimitable can be, but far indeed from that intricate subtlety of wit which makes ‘Hudibras’ a metaphysical study as well as an intellectual delight. We had in the ‘Federalist’ a mine of political wisdom by which even Burke might have profited, and whose golden veins are not yet exhausted, as foreign statists and jurists are beginning to discover. But of true literature we had next to nothing. Of what we had, Duyckinck’s scholarly ‘Cyclopædia of American Literature’ gives us an almost too satisfactory notion. Of what we had not, there was none to tell us, for there were no critics. We had no national unity, and therefore no national consciousness, and it is one of the first conditions of a virile and characteristic literature that it should feel solid and familiar earth under its feet. New England had indeed a kind of unity, but it was a provincial unity, and those hardy commonwealths that invented democracy were not and could not yet be quite in sympathy with the new America that was to adopt and expand it. Literature thrives in an air laden with tradition, in a soil ripe with immemorial culture, in the temperature, steady and stimulating, of historic associations. We had none of these. What semblance we had of them was English, and we long continued to bring earth from the mother-country to pot our imported plants with, as the crusaders brought home that of Palestine to be buried in. And all this time our native oak was dropping its unheeded acorns into the crannies of the rock where by and by their sturdy roots would make room for themselves and find fitting nourishment. “Never was young nation on its way to seek its fortune so dumfounded as Brother Jonathan when John Bull, presenting what seemed to his startled eyes a blunderbuss, cried gruffly from the roadside, ‘Stand, and deliver a literature!’ He was in a ‘pretty fix,’ as he himself would have called it. After fumbling in all his pockets, he was obliged to confess that he hadn’t one about him at the moment, but vowed that he had left a beautiful one at home which he would have fetched along--only it was so everlasting heavy. If he had but known it, he carried with him the pledge of what he was seeking in that vernacular phrase ‘fix,’ which showed that he could invent a new word for a new need without asking leave of anybody.