zettes, which were then the
principal vehicles of literary information. Willing to lend their aid to
check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors
conceived that ridicule would prove a powerful corrective, and that the
mode employed in the 'Echo' was the best suited to this purpose.... But
the ridicule of a vitiated mode of writing was not long the sole object
of the 'Echo.' The important political changes which soon after
occurred, not only in Europe, but in America, produced a corresponding
change in the republic of letters; and some of the principal gazettes of
this country exhibited a disgusting display, not only of a perversion of
taste in composition, but a still greater perversion of principle, in
that hideous morality of revolutionary madness, which, priding itself in
an emancipation from moral obligation, leveled the boundaries of virtue
and vice, while it contemptuously derided the most amiable and sacred
feelings of our nature. Disgusted with the cruelties exhibited by the
French Revolution at a very early stage of its progress, and viewing it
as a consuming fire, which, in the course of its conflagration,
threatened to destroy whatever was most valuable in society, the authors
wished to contribute their efforts in stemming the torrents of
Jacobinism in America, and resolved to render the 'Echo' subservient to
that purpose. They therefore proceeded to attack, as proper objects of
satire, those tenets, as absurd in politics as pernicious in morals, the
visionary scheme of equality, and the baleful doctrine that sanctions
the pursuit of a good end by the most flagitious means."

Webster's judgment of the condition of literature in the country at a
time when he was seeking to live by it is contained in a frank statement
which he makes in one of his letters to Dr. Priestley. That philosopher
had addressed certain letters to the inhabitants of Northumberland, in
which he undertook to lecture them as a philosophical and wise
Englishman might properly lecture the citizens of a young and
inexperienced republic. Webster replied in ten letters and a
postscript, which were collected into a pamphlet and published at New
Haven, in 1800. He contends throughout that Dr. Priestley did not know
his countrymen, and especially that he was ignorant of New England; he
corrects his political judgments, but admits the force in general of his
social and literary criticisms. The picture which Webster draws of t