The true-born Briton read as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There he stopped, and there he has stuck ever since. That sentence has been called a "glittering generality,"--as if there were some shallow insincerity about it. But because "all that glitters is not gold," it does not follow that nothing which glitters is gold. Because a statement is general, it does not follow that it is either untrue or unpractical. "Glittering generality" or not, the voice which proclaimed that the birthright of equality belonged to all mankind was the _fiat lux_ of the new-born political universe. This, and the terrible series of logical consequences that flowed from it, threatening all the dynasties, menacing all the hierarchies, undermining the seemingly solid foundations of all Old-World abuses,--this parent truth, and all to which it gave birth, made up the literature of Revolutionary America, and dwarfed all the lesser growths of culture for the time, as the pine-tree dwarfs the herbage beneath the circle of its spreading branches. As English policy had pursued the uniform course of provincializing our industry during the colonial period, discouraging every form of native ingenuity, so English criticism, naturally enough, after industry was set free, discountenanced the growth of a native American literature. That famous question of the "Quarterly Review," "Who reads an American book?" was the key--note of the critical chorus. There were shortcomings enough, no doubt, and all the faults that belong to an imperfectly educated people. But there was something more than the feeling of offended taste or unsatisfied scholarship in the _animus_ of British criticism. Mr. Tudor has expressed the effect it produced upon our own writers very clearly in his account of the "North American Review," written in 1820. He recognizes the undue deference paid to foreign critics, and, as its consequence, "a want, or rather a suppression, of national feeling and independent judgment, that would sooner or later have become highly injurious." It is not difficult to find examples, of earlier and of later date, which illustrate the tone of British feeling towards this country, as it has existed among leading literary men, and at times betrayed itself in an insolence which amuses us after the first sense of irritation has passed away.