of electoral votes, and
Adams was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of
a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his term "Old
Hickory," the hero of the people, the most characteristically
democratic of our presidents, and the first backwoodsman who entered
the White House, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm.
We have now arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher
and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an existence. S.
G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a bookseller and publisher in
1818, says, in his _Recollections_: "About this time I began to think
of trying to bring out original American works. . . . The general
impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It
was the precise point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter
taunt in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'Who reads an American book?' . . .
It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to
undertake American works." Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first
American author whose books, as _books_, obtained recognition abroad;
whose name was thought worthy of mention beside the names of English
contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. He was also
the first American writer whose writings are still read for their own
sake. We read Mather's _Magnalia_, and Franklin's _Autobiography_, and
Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn
about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and
_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_
for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of
literary art.

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan
standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a
minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come
to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these
forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned
to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and
of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We
may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the
thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and
Channing.

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other
government in this country than the government of th