ready mentioned the "young artist living in the
backwoods,"--will recognize in it something of the old style in which
the mother-country used to treat the Colonists.

It may be fairly claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the
American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements,
has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of
manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which
might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and
a maker of lawgivers, if not of laws. We are deficient principally in
patience of detail, and the skill which springs from minute subdivision
of labor and from hereditary training. All this will come
by-and-by,--all the sooner, if our ports are closed by foreign war. No
natural incapacity prevents us from making as good broadcloth, as fine
linen, as rich silks, as pure porcelain, as the Old World can send us.
If England wishes to hasten our complete industrial independence, she
has only to quarrel with us. We should miss many things at first which
we owe to her longer training, but they are mostly products of that kind
of industry which furnishes whatever the market calls for.

The intellectual development of the Colonists was narrowed and limited
by the conditions of their new life. There was no need of legislation to
discourage the growth of an American literature. At the period of the
Revolution two books had been produced which had a right to live, in
virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we
need not count in this category the records of events, such as
Winthrop's Journal, or Prince's Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous,
conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather's
"Magnalia." The two real American books were a "Treatise on the Will,"
and "Poor Richard's Almanack." Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin
were the only considerable names in American literature in all that
period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole
lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke
and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,--a period embracing five
generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen,
philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and
immortality. The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature
and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went