being the first of a long line of
indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature
worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank,
unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's
_Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royall Tyler, the author of _The
Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and
eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, _The Georgia
Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_,
published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.
It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan
of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war
between the United States and Algiers in 1815.

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was
also the first professional man of letters in this country who
supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in
1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city,
where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American
Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession
six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_,
_Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and something
of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid
in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne,
though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so
to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the contemporary
school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to
the class that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, Godwin's _Caleb Williams_
and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic"
romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs.
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A distinguishing characteristic of
this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's
romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations
that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but
they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt
and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by
elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind,
interspersed with the author's reflections. The wild improbabilities
of plot and the unnatural and