FOREWORDS. THE development of American literature during the first two centuries presents a peculiar phenomenon. The literature is not that of a people slowly emerging from barbarism and creating their own civilization through the long toil of ages. On the contrary, it is the literature of a people already highly civilized, but transplanted to another continent, where they set up in the wilderness the institutions of the Old World, modifying them to meet changed conditions and taking on in time a somewhat new spirit, yet on the whole clinging tenaciously to the substance of the old, and imitating with the provincial's feeling of dependence the current life and fashions of the mother country. A colonial literature has the advantage of inheriting the riches of an old civilization; it has the disadvantage of crude surroundings and lack of originality. Such was the case with American literature for two hundred years. During the first three-fourths of the seventeenth century, the period when most of the English colonies in America were planted, England was the home of great men and of a great literature. Spenser had died as the old century went out, Shakspere and Bacon lived on into the new, and Milton was born one year after the settlement of Jamestown. The colonists were of the same stock which had just produced these and other literary Titans ; but it would of course be folly to look for writers equally great in the forests of America. Settling a wilderness and laying the foundations of a state are of themselves tasks ample enough for the strongest. If Shakspere the deer-stealer had fled to Virginia instead of to London, if Milton had been a dissenting parson in a little New England village, should we have had King Lear and Paradise Lost? Furthermore, it should be remembered that for a century and more the population of the colonies was comparatively small; and since geniuses are rare in every generation, it is no wonder that they were not numerous among the few hundred thousand inhabitants scattered along the Atlantic seaboard. It must be said, however, that not only the great lights were absent from America, but the lesser ones as well, and that the general level of literary talent was low. Unfavorable environment accounts for this state of things in part; the character of the colonists accounts for yet more. Among the early settlers of the South were many paupers, convicts, and needy adventurers. In Virginia the leading colonists were indeed of the Cavalier class and inherently capable of literary culture; but there, as will soon be shown, the local conditions were peculiarly unfavorable for the creation of a literary atmosphere. And the Northern and Middle colonies were settled chiefly by practical, religious people, more intent upon their political rights and the salvation of their souls than upon the delights of belles lettres. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, literature in England itself was comparatively inferior, the splendid Elizabethan age of poetry and imagination having given place to the "age of prose and reason." Yet the names of Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Gray, Goldsmith, Johnson, Gibbon, and Hume are in their own way great, and American literature for the same period has — with two exceptions—no names tasks worthy of a place beside them. But this is not matter for surprise; conditions in America, although improving, were still unfavorable. Along the frontier the contest with wild nature went on unceasingly; and within the area already settled, arose a new set of sinew-straining the development of commerce and industry, the wars with France for the possession of Canada, and the struggle for independence and national union. Furthermore, from first to last the literature of the mother country retarded the growth of a native literature by diminishing the need of one; our ancestors imported poetry, essays, and novels from England just as they imported fine fabrics and other luxuries. Next to the inferiority of early American literature, the most conspicuous fact is its imitation of English models. Throughout its whole course it runs parallel with literature in the mother country, although usually lagging about a generation behind. In America as in England, the heavy prose of the seventeenth century is succeeded by lighter and more orderly prose in the eighteenth. The "metaphysical" poetry of the Jacobean and Caroline periods is solemnly echoed from the rocky New England coast. The didactic and satiric verse of Dryden and Pope feathers the shaft of the American satirist in regions which not long before knew only the whiz of the Indian's arrow. The profitable pleasantries of Addison, the pensive moralizing of Gray, the genial grace of Goldsmith, the ponderous sesquipedalian tread of Johnson, the new Romanticism of Collins, Macpherson, and Walpole, the "sensibility" of Mackenzie and Sterne, all find admirers and imitators in the colonial writers of verse and prose. I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD. (1607-1765.) EVENTS IN AMERICA. Settlement of Jamestown, 1607. Negro slavery introduced into Virginia, 1619. First settlement in North Carolina, 1653. Persecution of Quakers, 1656-1661. Landing of Pilgrims at Plymouth, English seize New York, 1664. 1620. New York settled by Dutch, 1621. Indian massacre in Virginia, 1622. Founding of Charleston, S.C., 1670. King Philip's War, 1675-1678. Founding of Massachusetts Bay Salem witchcraft, 1692. The Bloodless Revolution, 1688. William and Mary came to throne, 1689. Reign of Anne, 1702-1714. England a commonwealth, 1649- Reign of George I., 1714-1727. Reign of George II., 1727-1760. LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. Shakspere, 1564-1616. ΙΟ 1. LITERATURE IN VIRGINIA. For the beginnings of American literature we must go back nearly three centuries, to the time when a little band of Englishmen settled at Jamestown, Va., and erected a few rude huts on the edge of the primeval forest. Starvation, fever, Indians, and mismanagement soon threatened the very existence of the settlement, the horrors of the Starving Time slaying all but sixty out of a population of five hundred. Subsequently the colony grew and prospered. Yet toils and dangers. abounded still. Forests must be felled, houses built, and new land brought under the plough. From time to time Indian massacres spread death and alarm. The political storms which shook the mother country in the middle of the century agitated the colony too. And a little later, Bacon's Rebellion threw Virginia itself into the fever of civil strife. Such conditions, when the energies of men are absorbed in the strenuous labors of the pioneer, do not conduce to the growth of the fine arts. It is therefore no surprise to find that the literature of Virginia during these early years is comparatively meagre and poor. The writers were often unpractised, and had small leisure for the graces of style. But they wrote with the largeness and freedom and manly strength which were characteristic of the age; their pictures of peril by sea and land are powerful and graphic; and in their descrip |