along. Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were
rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state: for religion and politics
always play into each other's hands, and the constitution is the child
of the catechism. Harvard College was dedicated to "Christ and the
Church," but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at
Commencement, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if
the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved,"--Samuel Adams speaking
in the affirmative.

Such was the condition of America at the period just preceding the
Revolutionary movement. Commercial and industrial dependence maintained
by Acts of Parliament, and only beginning to be openly rebelled against
under the irritation produced by oppressive enactments. Native
development in the fields of letters and science hardly advanced beyond
the embryonic stage; a literature consisting of a metaphysical treatise
and a popular almanac, with some cart-loads of occasional sermons, some
volumes of historical notes, but not yet a single history, such as we
should now hold worthy of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful
poetry. Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in
America which was fit to sparkle upon the "stretched forefinger" of
Time. Berkeley's "Westward the course of Empire" _ought_ to have been
written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her
offspring were too puny to live.

The outbreak of the Revolution arrested what little growth there was in
letters and science. Franklin carried his reputation, the first one born
of science in the country, to the French court, and West and Copley
sought fame and success, and found them, in England. All the talent we
had was absorbed in the production of political essays and state-papers.
Patriotic poems, satires, _jeux d'esprit_, with more or less of the
_esprit_ implied in their name, were produced, not sparingly; but they
find it hard work to live, except in the memory of antiquaries. Philip
Freneau is known to more readers from the fact that Campbell did him the
honor to copy a line from him without acknowledgment than by all his
rhymes. It is not gratifying to observe the want, so noticeable in our
Revolutionary period, of that inspiration which the passions of such a
struggle might have been expected to bring with them.

If we are forced to put this estimate upon our earlier achievements in
the domain of letters, it is not sur