When an English statesman suggested that his Government would do well to cultivate the new Republic for the sake of trade if for no higher motive, Lord Brougham ridiculed the proposition of paying heed to "a people whose armies are as yet at the plough, or making awkward attempts at the loom, whose assembled navies could not lay siege to an English sloop of war." These sneers, although containing a large proportion of truth, exasperated the young nation beyond control. The provincialism of the day writhed under any suggestion that the New World was not the rival of the Old in every intellectual particular. A broader spirit would have confessed that time is required for the development of genius and the surroundings which conduce to a high development of intellectual and artistic life. Two decades later, Lowell satirised this American tendency in the _Fable for Critics_ by saying that while the Old World has produced barely eight poets, the New World begets a whole crop each year. "Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties, That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes; I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys, Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles, Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,-- In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain Will be some very great person over again." These extravagant claims incited fresh attacks. One British writer insisted that Federal America had done nothing either to extend, diversify, or embellish the sphere of human knowledge, and could produce nothing to bring her intellectual efforts into any sort of comparison with those of Europe. "Noah Webster, we are afraid," said he, "still occupies the first place in criticism, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow in poetry, and Mr. Justice Marshall in history." Another pronounced the celebrated Philosophic Hall in Philadelphia a "meeting house" for the society, where its transactions were "scooped together" in the "genuine dialect of tradesmen." Not only the published papers of the Philosophic Society were held up to ridicule, but also John Quincy Adams's _Letters from Silesia_, Marshall's _Life of Washington_, Barlow's _Columbiad_, Dwight's poetry, and Lewis and Clark's history of their expedition. "But why should the Americans write books," asked the _Edinburgh Review_, "when a six weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads. Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural objects for centuries to come."