ening brain is
uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is its melancholy apology.

But in the interval between the cudgel-stroke of Johnson and the
mud-throwing of Carlyle, America had grown strong enough to bear the
assaults of literary bullies and mountebanks without serious annoyance.
The question which had been so superciliously asked was at last
answered. _Everybody_ reads an American book. The morning-star of our
literature rose in the genius of IRVING. There was something in his
personal conditions which singularly fitted him to introduce the New
World in its holiday-dress to the polite company of the Old World. His
father was a Scotchman, his mother was an Englishwoman, and he was born
in America. "Diedrich Knickerbocker" is a near relation of some of
Scott's characters; "Bracebridge Hall" might have been written by an
Englishman; while "Ichabod Crane" and "Rip Van Winkle" are American to
their marrow. The English naturally found Irving too much like their own
writers in his English subjects, and they could not thoroughly relish
his purely American pictures and characters. Cooper, who did not love
the English, and showed it, a navy officer, too, who dwelt with delight
on the sea-fights of the War of 1812, was too American to please them.
Dr. Channing had a limited circle of admirers in Great Britain, but
could reach only a few even of the proscribed Dissenting class in any
effective way.

Prescott, we believe, did more than any other one man to establish the
independence of American authorship. He was the first, so far as we
know, who worked with a truly adequate literary apparatus, and at the
same time brought the results of his extensive, long-continued, costly
researches into picture-like and popular forms. It was not the judgment
of England, but of Europe, that settled his claims in the world of
letters; and from the day when the verdict of the learned world awarded
him a place in the first rank of historians, the hereditary curse of
American authorship was removed, and the insolent question of the
Quarterly was asked no more.

From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and
America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English
writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United
States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a
welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British
reading constituency.

Nev