interests of America. I
consider it as a capital fault in all our schools that the books
generally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting to our youth; while
the writings that marked the Revolution, which are perhaps not inferior
to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and which are calculated to
impress interesting truths upon young minds, lie neglected and
forgotten. Several of those masterly addresses of Congress, written at
the commencement of the late Revolution, contain such noble sentiments
of liberty and patriotism that I cannot help wishing to transfuse them
into the breasts of the rising generation." Accordingly, he makes
abundant room in his book for orations by Hancock, Warren, Livingston,
and Joel Barlow, and for poetry by Freneau, Dwight, Barlow, and
Livingston again, all kept in countenance by Cicero, Publius Scipio,
Shakespeare, and Pope, while a tribute is paid to "Mr. Andrus of Yale
College, since deceased," by the insertion of "A Dialogue written in the
year 1776." To plump from Joel Barlow at the North Church in Hartford,
July 4, 1787, to a portion of Cicero's oration against Verres, probably
produced no severe shock, since both orations were intended as exercises
in speaking, and the former by its structure was removed to about the
same chronological distance from the young speaker as the latter. It
would be a curious inquiry how far writers of historical addresses in
America have from the beginning been affected by the necessity which a
regard for ancient models laid upon them of fitting the facts of our
Revolutionary War to oratorical periods, and how far popular
conceptions of the beginning of our national life have been formed by
the "pieces" which young Americans have been called upon to speak. The
Roman was the most distinguished predecessor by name of this new
republic, and enthusiastic patriots went to it for literary furniture as
freely as their ancestors in New England applied to the Jewish
theocracy. In the contemporary ephemeral literature of the time there is
a faint survival of the older forms, but a more energetic reproduction
of Roman symbols, taken sometimes directly from Latin literature and
history, sometimes indirectly from the chill Augustan renaissance of the
English eighteenth-century literature. The interior manners of the two
periods are well contrasted in two sets of letters, the earlier passing
between John and Margaret Winthrop, the later between John and Abigail
A