s well under way. It is true that the Revolution
had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these {366} were
strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the consciousness
of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the contemporary work
of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their
importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though
the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due course in the
present chapter. It is also true that one or two of Irving's early
books fall within the last years of the period now under consideration.
But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, and these
writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that
preceded and accompanied the revolutionary movement, were the speeches
of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy
in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of
a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome,
and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and
congresses of revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished
naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical
age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the declamatory
_Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and
the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early congresses.
The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely
traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses
{367} the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is
good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is
sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional,
rather than universal and permanent explains why so few speeches are
really literature.

If this is true, even where the words of an orator are preserved
exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we have only the
testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the oration
produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either
not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can
judge of them only at second hand. Patrick Henry has fared better,
many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not in the
letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the def