Not only was Brockden Brown the first American man-of-letters proper,--one writing for a living before we had any real literature of our own,--but his work possessed a genuine power and originality which gives it some claim to remembrance for its own sake. And it is fair always to remember that a given product from a pioneer indicates a far greater endowment than the same from one of a group in a more developed age. The forerunner lacks not one thing only, but many things, which help his successors. He lacks the mental friction from, the emulation of, the competition with, other writers; he lacks the stimulus and comfort of sympathetic companionship; he lacks an audience to spur him on, and a market to work for; lacks labor-saving conventions, training, and an environment that heartens him instead of merely tolerating him. Like Robinson Crusoe, he must make his tools before he can use them. A meagre result may therefore be a proof of great abilities. [Illustration: CHARLES B. BROWN] The United States in 1800 was mentally and morally a colony of Great Britain still. A few hundred thousand white families scattered over about as many square miles of territory, much of it refractory wilderness with more refractory inhabitants; with no cities of any size, and no communication save by wretched roads or by sailing vessels; no rich old universities for centres of culture, and no rich leisured society to enjoy it; the energies of the people perforce absorbed in subduing material obstacles, or solidifying a political experiment disbelieved in by the very men who organized it;--neither time nor materials existed then for an independent literary life, which is the growth of security and comfort and leisure if it embraces a whole society, or of endowed college foundations and an aristocracy if it is only of the few. Hence American society took its literary meals at the common table of the English-speaking race, with little or no effort at a separate establishment. There was much writing, but mostly polemic or journalistic. When real literature was attempted, it consisted in general of imitations of British essays, or fiction, or poetry; and in the last two cases not even imitations of the best models in either. The essays were modeled on Addison; the poetry on the heavy imitators of Pope's heroics; the fiction either on the effusive sentimentalists who followed Richardson, or on the pseudo-Orientalists like Walpole and Lewis, or on the pseudo-mediævalists like Mrs. Roche and Mrs. Radcliffe. This sort of work filled the few literary periodicals of the day, but was not read enough to make such publications profitable even then, and is pretty much all unreadable now.