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would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.

That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson’s day it was almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. “The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned,” says a recent literary historian, “have all flourished since 1800.” 8 Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession,” and Justice Story, three years later, repeated the saying and sought to account for the fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in America that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively to literature or the fine arts.… This obvious reason will explain why we have so few professional authors, and those not among our ablest men.” All this was true, but a new day was dawning; Irving, in fact, had already published “Knickerbocker” and Bryant had printed “Thanatopsis.” Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of the few native books that were written. “It is much to be regretted,” wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, “that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them.” Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time. Nor was there, indeed, much reading of English books; the Americans, as in colonial days, were faithful to a few sober works, and cared little for belles lettres. “There is at this moment,” said an English observer in 1833, 9 “nothing in the United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an

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