rican
book?" was the key--note of the critical chorus. There were shortcomings
enough, no doubt, and all the faults that belong to an imperfectly
educated people. But there was something more than the feeling of
offended taste or unsatisfied scholarship in the _animus_ of British
criticism. Mr. Tudor has expressed the effect it produced upon our own
writers very clearly in his account of the "North American Review,"
written in 1820. He recognizes the undue deference paid to foreign
critics, and, as its consequence, "a want, or rather a suppression, of
national feeling and independent judgment, that would sooner or later
have become highly injurious."

It is not difficult to find examples, of earlier and of later date,
which illustrate the tone of British feeling towards this country, as it
has existed among leading literary men, and at times betrayed itself in
an insolence which amuses us after the first sense of irritation has
passed away.

In 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English
literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time,
wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an
Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic,
impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption.
No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus
discovered the New. Its inhabitants--the countrymen of Washington and
Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson--multiply, as he tells us, "with the
fecundity of their own rattlesnakes." Of the fathers of our Revolution
he speaks in no more flattering terms:--"Probably in _America_, as in
other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the
tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively
combustible." All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us
now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to
gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens.

In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth,
and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the
English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The
specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find
their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not
lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted
it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a soft