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absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be extracted. At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of Europe—especially in Germany—as a man comparatively ignorant. Why does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intellectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?” According to this critic, the value of the books imported from Europe during the fiscal year 1829-30 for public institutions came to but $10,829.

But nevertheless English periodical literature seems to have been read, at least by the nascent intelligentsia, and its influence undoubtedly helped to keep the national literature imitative and timorous in those early and perilous days. “Before the Revolution,” says Cairns, 10 “colonists of literary tastes prided themselves on reading the Gentlemen’s Magazine or the London Magazine, and it is probable that the old tradition retained for these and similar publications many subscribers.… Letters from American readers appear occasionally in British magazines [of the period], and others imply the existence of a considerable American constituency.… It is certain, at all events, that the chief American [obviously a misprint for British] critical journals were received by American editors, and important criticisms of American writings were often reprinted in this country.” The extraordinary animosity of the English and Scottish reviewers, then at the height of their pontifical authority, to all locutions that had an American smack was described in the last chapter; as everyone knows, that animosity extended to the content of American works as well as to the style. All things American, indeed, were under the ban in England after the War of 1812, and Sydney Smith’s famous sneer—“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?”—was echoed and re-echoed in other planes. The Yankee, flushed with victory, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood’s, for a generation following 1812, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney

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