y and the higher refinements of life. The
Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so
throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is
now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national
being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of
their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them
who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have
added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to
call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the
independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration,
Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been
recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the
Western race.

The bulk of the literature of America is, of course, still small in
proportion to the culture and intellectual energy of the country; but it
has been and is sufficient to interpret in a more or less distinctive
way all the leading phases in the evolution of the national thought and
sentiment. The subtle influence of the deeply-grounded religious feeling
which, implanted by the Puritan pioneers, has survived generations of
intense absorption in material progress and the distractions that modern
life offers to the possessors of newly-acquired wealth; the pride of the
people in their independence, and their natural tendency to overrate it
in comparison; with the conditions of other countries; the contrasts
furnished by a society fond of reproducing European habits, yet
retaining a simplicity and freshness of its own: these and other
features in the progress of the United States for over a century may be
found expressed in its literature from the native standpoint, and not
merely from that of the intelligent outside observer.

An American writer in discussing, a few years ago, the quality of the
literature produced before the War of Secession, when wealth and leisure
were abundant among the planters and in the principal New England towns,
observed that 'there would seem to be something in the relation of a
colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the
former to a hopeless provincialism.' If a comment so largely fanciful
could be made respecting Australasia and Canada, it would practically
mean--at all events from the American point of view--that as long as
they remain dependencies of