In 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time, wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic, impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption. No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants--the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson--multiply, as he tells us, "with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution he speaks in no more flattering terms:--"Probably in _America_, as in other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively combustible." All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens. In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is its melancholy apology. But in the interval between the cudgel-stroke of Johnson and the mud-throwing of Carlyle, America had grown strong enough to bear the assaults of literary bullies and mountebanks without serious annoyance. The question which had been so superciliously asked was at last answered. _Everybody_ reads an American book. The morning-star of our literature rose in the genius of IRVING. There was something in his personal conditions which singularly fitted him to introduce the New World in its holiday-dress to the polite company of the Old World. His father was a Scotchman, his mother was an Englishwoman, and he was born in America. "Diedrich Knickerbocker" is a near relation of some of Scott's characters; "Bracebridge Hall" might have been written by an Englishman; while "Ichabod Crane" and "Rip Van Winkle" are American to their marrow. The English naturally found Irving too much like their own writers in his English subjects, and they could not thoroughly relish his purely American pictures and characters. Cooper, who did not love the English, and showed it, a navy officer, too, who dwelt with delight on the sea-fights of the War of 1812, was too American to please them. Dr. Channing had a limited circle of admirers in Great Britain, but could reach only a few even of the proscribed Dissenting class in any effective way.