oducts are the only viands
worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was
different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of
value turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language;
namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work was
immediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuable
services was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored the
vernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in the
schools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and in
his translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature.

Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all
literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all
great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to
America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you
were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would
see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such
conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves
connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a
domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is
deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply
to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the
imported and the remote.

I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its
prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and
woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its
inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality
of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and
I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have
done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs--in saying
which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a
stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American
letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there
were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own
writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America.
America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and
among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a
Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no
historians th