Such was the condition of America at the period just preceding the Revolutionary movement. Commercial and industrial dependence maintained by Acts of Parliament, and only beginning to be openly rebelled against under the irritation produced by oppressive enactments. Native development in the fields of letters and science hardly advanced beyond the embryonic stage; a literature consisting of a metaphysical treatise and a popular almanac, with some cart-loads of occasional sermons, some volumes of historical notes, but not yet a single history, such as we should now hold worthy of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful poetry. Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in America which was fit to sparkle upon the "stretched forefinger" of Time. Berkeley's "Westward the course of Empire" _ought_ to have been written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her offspring were too puny to live. The outbreak of the Revolution arrested what little growth there was in letters and science. Franklin carried his reputation, the first one born of science in the country, to the French court, and West and Copley sought fame and success, and found them, in England. All the talent we had was absorbed in the production of political essays and state-papers. Patriotic poems, satires, _jeux d'esprit_, with more or less of the _esprit_ implied in their name, were produced, not sparingly; but they find it hard work to live, except in the memory of antiquaries. Philip Freneau is known to more readers from the fact that Campbell did him the honor to copy a line from him without acknowledgment than by all his rhymes. It is not gratifying to observe the want, so noticeable in our Revolutionary period, of that inspiration which the passions of such a struggle might have been expected to bring with them. If we are forced to put this estimate upon our earlier achievements in the domain of letters, it is not surprising that they were held of small account in the mother-country. It is not fair to expect the British critics to understand our political literature, which was until these later years all we had to show. They had to wait until De Lolme, a Swiss exile, explained their own Constitution to them, before they had a very clear idea of it. One British tourist after another visited this country, with his glass at his eye, and his small vocabulary of "Very odd!" for all that was new to him; his "Quite so!" for whatever was noblest in thought or deed; his "Very clever!" for the encouragement of genius; and his "All that sort of thing, you know!" for the less marketable virtues and heroisms not to be found in the Cockney price-current. They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular comprehension.