ature, it should be a _national_
literature; no feeble or sonorous echo of Germany or England, but
essentially American in its tone and object. No matter how meritorious a
composition may be, as long as any foreign nation can say that it has done
the same thing better, so long shall we be spoken of with contempt, or in
a spirit of benevolent patronage. We begin to sicken of the custom, now so
common, of presenting even our best poems to the attention of foreigners,
with a deprecating, apologetic air; as if their acceptance of the
offering, with a few soft and silky compliments, would be an act of
kindness demanding our warmest acknowledgments. If the Quarterly Review or
Blackwood's Magazine speaks well of an American production, we think that
we can praise it ourselves, without incurring the reproach of bad taste.
The folly we yearly practise, of flying into passion with some inferior
English writer, who caricatures our faults, and tells dull jokes about his
tour through the land, has only the effect to exalt an insignificant
scribbler into notoriety, and give a nominal value to his recorded
impertinence. If the mind and heart of the country had its due expression,
if its life had taken form in a literature worthy of itself, we should pay
little regard to the childish tattling of a pert coxcomb who was
discontented with our taverns, or the execrations of some bluff
sea-captain who was shocked with our manners. The uneasy sense we have of
something in our national existence which has not yet been fitly
expressed, gives poignancy to the least ridicule launched at faults and
follies which lie on the superficies of our life. Every person feels, that
a book which condemns the country for its peculiarities of manners and
customs, does not pierce into the heart of the matter, and is essentially
worthless. If Bishop BERKELEY, when he visited MALEBRANCHE, had paid
exclusive attention to the habitation, raiment, and manners of the man,
and neglected the conversation of the metaphysician, and, when he returned
to England, had entertained POPE, SWIFT, GAY, and ARBUTHNOT with satirical
descriptions of the 'compliment extern' of his eccentric host, he would
have acted just as wisely as many an English tourist, with whose malicious
pleasantry on our habits of chewing, spitting, and eating, we are silly
enough to quarrel. To the United States in reference to the pop-gun shots
of foreign tourists, might be addressed the warning which Peter