and anniversary kind, and
were rather lectures and Ph. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett
was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great
natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on
Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes,
have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer
in recollection.

New England, during these years, did not take {429} that leading part
in the purely literary development of the country which it afterward
assumed. It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper.
Drake and Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of
quantity--were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague,
whose _Shakespere Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1823, was
locally famous; and Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem,
the _Buccaneer_, 1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time
been without a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a
circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of
great geniuses. The _North American Review_, established in 1815,
though it has been wittily described as "ponderously revolving through
space" for a few years after its foundation, did not exist in an
absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be
sure, was a Massachusetts man--as were Everett and Choate--but his
triumphs were won in the wider field of national politics. There was,
however, a movement at this time in the intellectual life of Boston and
Eastern Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contributory to
the finer kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and
stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next generation.
This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which
William Ellery Channing was the principal leader. In a community so
intensely theological as New England it was natural that any {430} new
movement in thought should find its point of departure in the churches.
Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the age, which in
other parts of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachusetts
the form of "liberal Christianity." Arminianism, Socinianism, and
other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine, had been latent in some of
the Congregational churches of Massachusetts for a number of years.
But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few