In 1757 the first exhibition of paintings by colonial artists was held in New York. Before long, Copley, Peale, Benjamin West, who later became president of the Royal Academy, and Stuart were painting and, with lesser figures, were in the way of establishing an American school of art. Colonial architecture, domestic and public, was so good that we do our best to reproduce it to-day, as was likewise the furniture. Merchants in the North, country gentlemen in the South, lived much the same lives as did their contemporaries of similar standing in the old country. The ablest men of the colonies in innumerable instances held legislative and judicial offices. There was no titled aristocracy, there were no cathedrals or ruined castles from the past, life was a little freer, less formal, considerably more open to economic opportunity than in England; but so far from excusing themselves on the ground of being a new people the colonials rather prided themselves on living the same life and indulging the same tastes as their cousins overseas. America was indeed provincial, but then, so also was all England outside the one center of London. Much not only of the talent but the genius of England had always been recruited from the[Pg 252] provinces, and America had made a good beginning two centuries ago in contributing, among other types, men whose paintings hang to-day on the walls of London galleries. Franklin’s fame was European. When Berkeley, the English philosopher, was temporarily living in Rhode Island he found no lack of agreeable society and intelligent conversation in the circle in which he moved. The lower grades had permanently lost their folk-arts and had taken on some frontier characteristics, but there was every indication that a new civilization, following the main cultural interests, values, and trends of the old, was arising rapidly after the break due to the task of subduing the wilderness. Had the continent been limited, as I suggested, to the seaboard strip, or had the people chosen to expand gradually, there is no reason to suppose that the cultural tendencies noted above as on the upward trend through the eighteenth century would not have continued.