"What suits Great Britain, with her insular position and consequent need to concentrate and intensify her life, her limited monarchy and spirit of trade, does not suit a mixed race, continually enriched (?) with new blood from other stocks the most unlike that of our first descent, with ample field and verge enough to range in and leave every impulse free, and abundant opportunity to develop a genius wide and full as our rivers, luxuriant and impassioned as our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed." Margaret anticipates for this Western hemisphere the rise and development of such a genius, but says that this cannot come until the fusion of races shall be more advanced, nor "until this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity to prize moral and intellectual no less highly than political freedom." She finds the earnest of this greater time in the movements already leading to social reforms, and in the "stern sincerity" of elect individuals, but thinks that the influences at work "must go deeper before we can have poets." At the time of her writing (1844-45) she considers literature as in a "dim and struggling state," with "pecuniary results exceedingly pitiful. The state of things gets worse and worse, as less and less is offered for works demanding great devotion of time and labor, and the publisher, obliged to regard the transaction as a matter of business, demands of the author only what will find an immediate market, for he cannot afford to take anything else." Margaret thinks that matters were better in this respect during the first half-century of our republican existence. The country was not then "so deluged with the dingy page reprinted from Europe." Nor did Americans fail to answer sharply the question, "Who reads an American book?" But the books of that period, to which she accords much merit, seem to her so reflected from England in their thought and inspiration, that she inclines to call them English rather than American. Having expressed these general views, Margaret proceeds to pass in review the prominent American writers of the time, beginning with the department of history. In this she accords to Prescott industry, the choice of valuable material, and the power of clear and elegant arrangement. She finds his books, however, "wonderfully tame," and characterized by "the absence of thought." In Mr. Bancroft she recognizes a writer of a higher order, possessed of "leading thoughts, by whose aid he groups his facts." Yet, by her own account, she has read him less diligently than his brother historian.