NEAR the middle of the year 1664, the Dutch town of New Amsterdam was suddenly transformed into the English town of New York,—being then just forty-one years old, and having a population of fifteen hundred souls. The whole province, of course, shared the new name and the new mastership that had overtaken its chief town.

     The Dutch, who founded both town and province, had thriven there from the beginning, according to the habit of their race,—a patient, devout, labor-loving, wealth-getting, stolid community. Though popular education was neglected, and intellectual life ran sluggish and dull, there were among them many men of strong brains and scholarly attainments:¹ Van der Donck, Megapolensis, and De Vries, who wrote history; Stuyvesant, Beeckman, and Van Rensselaer, whose letters show considerable learning; Van Dincklagen, and Van Schelluyne, who were wise in the law;. Jacob Steendam, Henricus Selyns, and Nicasius De Sillè, who wrote poetry;² and besides these, several theologians and physicians who were well-read in their own sciences.

     Though the prevailing race in New Amsterdam was Dutch, from an early day the town had been an attractive one to men of other races. Twenty-one years before it fell into the hands of the English, it had, within it and near it, a population speaking eighteen different languages.³ After it fell into the hands of the English, its attractiveness to men of many languages certainly did not diminish; and it became, what its best historian calls it, “the most polygenous of all the British dependencies in North America.”⁴ In the first twenty-four years of its existence under English sway, its population was nearly quadrupled; and by the end of the colonial time, it had increased almost twenty-fold. A community of many tongues, of many customs, of many faiths,—there was, doubtless, in that fact a prophecy of metropolitan largeness and generosity, in store for it somewhere in the future.

     Nevertheless, we shall greatly err if we imagine that, during the larger part of the colonial time, New York was much more than a prosperous and drowsy Dutch village,

perplexed by polyglot interference and the menace of intellectual illumination; the scene of a petty life; ravaged by sectarian and provincial bigotries, and by vulgar competitions in society and in politics; very slowly moving toward the discovery that, in all the world, there is any other pursuit so noble as the pursuit of wealth. The historian, William Smith, writing in 1757, mentions that, for a long time, his own father and James De Lancey “were the only academics” in the province; and that, as late as 1745, there were only thirteen more.¹ “What a contrast,” he exclaims, “in everything respecting the cultivation of science, between this and the colonies first settled by the English!”² “Our schools are of the lowest order—the instructors want instruction; and through a long and shameful neglect of all the arts and sciences, our common speech is extremely corrupt; and the evidences of bad taste, both as to thought and language, are visible in all our proceedings, public and private.”³

     The history of literature in such a community, at such a period, must be the record, not of any concentrated and continuous literary activity, but of the occasional efforts of cultivated men to express themselves, for practical purposes, in some literary form.

     DANIEL DENTON, the son of a minister in Connecticut, removed in 1644 into the province of New York, where he rose to distinction both as a land-owner and as a politician. In 1670, apparently with the view of attracting immigration to that province, he published, in London, “A Brief Description of New York,”⁴—a book of twenty-two pages, uncommonly graphic and animated. He kept closely to the facts that had come under his own eyes, prudently declining

to say anything about those portions of the province that lay “to the northward yet undiscovered,” or in “the bowels of the earth not yet opened.” Even on the basis of literal and visible fact, however, he had enough, both useful and beautiful, to justify his enthusiasm for the land which he sought to make known to English emigrants. He gives an account of its fitness for all sorts of industrial success; not forgetting to describe its natural charms, as in May, when “you shall see the woods and fields so curiously bedecked with roses, and an innumerable multitude of delightful flowers, . . . that you may behold nature contending with art, and striving to equal if not excel many gardens in England;”¹ and “divers sorts of singing-birds, whose chirping notes salute the ears of travellers with an harmonious discord; and in every pond and brook, green, silken frogs, who, warbling forth their untuned tunes, strive to bear a part in this music.”² Having given a sufficient account of the natural and social advantages of the province, he seeks to win inhabitants for it by appealing to the English love of personal independence and domestic thrift: “If there be any terrestrial happiness to be had by people of all ranks, especially of an inferior rank, it must certainly be here. Here any one may furnish himself with land, and live rent-free; yea, with such a quantity of land that he may weary himself with walking over his fields of corn and all sorts of grain. . . . Here those which Fortune hath frowned upon in England to deny them an inheritance amongst their brethren, or such as by their utmost labors can scarcely procure a living, . . . may procure here inheritances of lands and possessions, stock themselves with all sorts of cattle, enjoy the benefit of them whilst they live, and leave them to the benefit of their children when they die. Here you need not trouble the shambles for meat, nor bakers and brewers for beer and bread, nor run to a linen-draper for a supply. . . . If there

be any terrestrial Canaan, ’tis surely here, where the land floweth with milk and honey. The inhabitants are blessed with peace and plenty, blessed in their country, blessed in their fields, blessed in the fruit of their bodies, in the fruit of their grounds, in the increase of their cattle, horses, and sheep, blessed in their basket and in their store; in a word, blessed in whatsoever they take in hand, or go about, the earth yielding plentiful increase to all their painful labors.”¹

     Precisely fifteen years after the publication of Daniel Denton’s winsome sketch of the province of New York, Thomas Budd, of New Jersey, a worthy Quaker, and a man of much importance in his own neighborhood, published, likewise at London, a little book entitled “Good Order established in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in America.”² The purpose of this book, like that of Daniel Denton, was to catch the eye of emigrants; and for that purpose it perhaps did not need, as certainly it did not have, much literary merit.

     Another book belonging to this pioneer period of literature in New York: and its neighborhood, is a very curious one: “News of a Trumpet sounding in the Wilderness; or, The Quakers’ ancient testimony revived, examined, and compared with itself, and also with their new doctrine—whereby the ignorant may learn wisdom and the wise advance in their understandings;” published by William Bradford in 1697, and written by Daniel Leeds, once a Quaker and an early settler in Pennsylvania. This man, having quarrelled with his brethren there, abandoned them and finally their province, and established himself in New York, probably in 1693, where, for about thirty years, he continued in his famous almanacs that warfare against the Quakers which he had begun in his book.

     LEWIS MORRIS, born in 1671, on the paternal estate of Morrisania, lived a long and vigorous life as colonial politician in New York and New Jersey; was, for more than twenty years, chief-justice of the former province, and died, in 1746, as royal governor of the latter; a man of large inherited wealth, of high social consideration, of bold and somewhat unscrupulous talent; a natural intriguer. Though he settled into manhood sufficiently sedate, his youth was uncommonly vivacious, and sparkled long afterward in a trail of amusing traditions. Being left an orphan in his infancy, he came under the care of an uncle, who seems to have found the boy hard to tame into industry and propriety. At one time, he had for his tutor an enthusiastic Quaker, one Hugh Coppathwaite, who enjoyed much of the divine presence through various inward and outward communications. The boy conceived the happy thought of helping his preceptor to a new revelation, and himself to a holiday; and, accordingly, hiding in the branches of a tree under which the Quaker was used to walk, the lad called out to him in solemn tones, and commanded him to go away at once, and preach the gospel among the Mohawks. The good man accepted the mandate as the very voice of heaven, and was on the point of setting out to obey it, when, unluckily for the boy, the trick was discovered, and his studies were not interrupted.¹ Subsequently, breaking away from all restraints, he roamed into Virginia to see the world, thence to the West Indies, picking up a living as best he could; after some years, the vagabond came home, was pardoned by his uncle, married, and entered soon upon his distinguished public career. He was an able speaker; loved power over men, and the arts by which it is gained; and though his own contact with books must have been casual

and irregular, he greatly enjoyed literature and the society of literary men.¹ There remains a letter of his to his London bookseller, for the year 1739, containing a list of books which he desired, and indicating that, even at the age of sixty-eight, his mind was reaching out toward new studies, as well as old ones: law books, political treatises, theological writings, histories, a Hebrew grammar, an Arabic grammar, and an edition of John Milton.²

     He wrote nothing that he thought of as literature; but the brightness and vigor of his mind are shown in his correspondence, and in his state-papers. He appears to have been not incapable even of sportive rhymes on occasion. For instance, in 1709, in sending to the governor of New York, Lord Lovelace, a memorial for the board of trade, he added a private address on his own account, beginning with these lines:

     In 1735, he went to England, to make complaint to the parliament and ministry respecting the conduct of William Cosby, at that time governor of New York, under royal appointment; and his letters to friends at home are good examples of the sprightliness of his mind. The visit of this American politician to the metropolis, appears to have been the means of a rough disenchantment, robbing him of many beautiful provincial illusions respecting the tender and paternal care with which English statesmen were supposed to deal with Americans and their affairs: “You have very imperfect notions of the world on this side of the water—I mean that world with which I have to do. They are unconcerned at the sufferings of the people in

America. . . . It may be you will be surprised to hear that the most nefarious crime a governor can commit is not, by some, counted so bad, as the crime of complaining of it; the last is an arraigning of the ministry that advised the sending of him.”¹ “We talk in America of applications to parliaments. Alas! my friend, parliaments are parliaments everywhere; here, as well as with us, though more numerous. We admire the heavenly bodies which glitter at a distance; but should we be removed into Jupiter or Saturn, perhaps we should find it composed of as dark materials as our own earth: . . . We have a parliament and ministry, some of whom, I am apt to believe, know that there are plantations and governors—but not quite so well as we do. Like the frogs in the fable, the mad pranks of a plantation governor is sport to them, though death to us; and [they] seem less concerned in our contests than we are at those between crows and king-birds. Governors are called the king’s representatives; and when by repeated instances of avarice, cruelty, and injustice, they extort complaints from the injured, in terms truly expressive of the violence committed and injuries suffered, it must be termed a flying in the face of government; the king’s representative must be treated with softness and decency; the thing complained of is nothing near so criminal in them, as the manner of complaint in the injured. And who is there that is equal to the task of procuring redress? Changing the man is far from an adequate remedy, if the thing remains the same; and we had as well keep an ill, artless governor we know, as to change him for one equally ill, with more art, that we do not know. One of my neighbors used to say that he always rested better in a bed abounding with fleas after they had filled their bellies, than to change it for a new one equally full of hungry ones; the fleas having no business there but to eat. The inference is easy.”²

     CADWALLADER COLDEN was the son of a Presbyterian minister in Scotland, but was himself accidentally born in Ireland. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh; after studying medicine there and in London, he emigrated to America in 1710, and settled at Philadelphia for the practice of his profession. In 1718, at the friendly solicitation of General Robert Hunter, the governor of New York, he removed to that province, where he received the office of surveyor-general; became proprietor of a large estate in lands; was made a member of the king’s council, and in the latter part of his life, lieutenant-governor, with frequent exercise of the duties of governor; and died, in September, 1776, aged eighty-eight, a loyalist to his king, and bitterly hated by the people whom he had served so long, but whose later movements toward revolution he had felt it his duty to resist.

     Thus, the life of Cadwallader Colden, though it had a patriarchal length, had not the patriarchal quietude; it was a life of manifold outward occupation, and latterly of political turmoil and rancor; and yet, so valiant and craving was his spirit, that he found time, during all those busy lustrums of his, to be not only a cultivator of various learning, but one of the leaders of mankind in its cultivation. A monument of his industry and of his versatility, remains to us in the vast mass of his writings, published and unpublished, which deal, acutely and philosophically, with almost every great topic of human interest,—divinity, ethics, metaphysics, politics, mathematics, history, geology, botany, optics, zoology, medicine, agriculture, and even certain improvements in the mechanic arts, as stereotypy.¹

     The one production of his that most nearly approaches a purely literary effort, is “The History of the Five Indian

Nations.” Of this work, the first part, bringing the narrative down to 1688, was originally published in New York, in 1727;¹ and the second part, continuing the narrative to the peace of Ryswick, 1697, was published in London, in 1747.² The book is principally a sketch of five powerful allied Indian tribes then residing in the northern part of the province of New York,—their forms of government, their wars with hostile tribes, their conflicts and treaties with Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Englishmen; upon the whole, a very slender, not altogether accurate, and not in the least interesting account of sundry parcels of savages, of their steady employment in scalping and in getting scalped, mitigated by occasional interludes of palaver with one another and with white men. Though the author writes with ease, and generally with verbal correctness, it is impossible for him to redeem his book from the curse of being a history of what deserves no history. A single episode, giving the exploits of the Algonquin chief, Piscaret, has some dramatic vividness, even though also the flavor of palpable myth;³ while the best piece of writing in the book, is its dedication to William Burnet, the governor of New York, particularly, the passage wherein the author celebrates the austere virtues of the savages whose history he records: “The Five Nations are a poor, barbarous people, under the darkest ignorance; and yet a bright and noble genius shines through these black clouds. None of the greatest Roman heroes have discovered a greater love to their country, or a greater contempt of death, than these barbarians have done, when life and liberty came in competition. Indeed, I think our Indians have outdone the Romans in this particular; for some of the greatest Romans have murdered themselves, to avoid

shame or torments; whereas our Indians have refused to die, meanly, with the least pain, when they thought their country’s honor would be at stake by it, but gave their bodies willingly up to the most cruel torments of their enemies, to show that the Five Nations consisted of men whose courage and resolution could not be shaken.”¹

     The hope that these vivacious sentences awaken in us, of some broad and fine human interest connected with the history of the author’s nude patriots and stoics, is not fulfilled.

     In the year 1722, there was published in London a book respecting America, which deserved the deep attention of English and American statesmen at that time, and which, on one account, is still worthy of remembrance by us. It bore this formidable title: “A Description of the English Province of Carolana, by the Spaniards called Florida, and by the French La Louisiane; as also the great and famous river, Meschacebe or Mississippi, the five vast navigable lakes of fresh-water, and the parts adjacent; together with an account of the commodities, of the growth and production of the said province; and a preface containing some considerations on the consequences of the French making settlements there.”

     The author was Daniel Coxe, a man of wealth, and of high social and political influence in New Jersey, who had inherited from his father a claim to the vast territory described in his book. It is the preface of the book, however, that is now of special interest to us; for in that preface, the author discussed, at great length and with great ability, the condition and the perils of the English colonies in America, the legal right of the English to the interior of the continent, and especially, the strategy to be pursued by enlightened statesmanship in realizing that

right in opposition to the competing claims of the Spanish and the French. The chief element in the strategy proposed by him, is described in one word-union. Thus, in 1722, Daniel Coxe publicly explained and advocated a plan of union among the American colonies,—the details of which closely resemble those brought forward by Franklin, thirty-two years afterward, at the famous congress of Albany: “That all the colonies . . . be united under a legal, regular, and firm establishment; over which . . . a lieutenant or supreme governor may be . . . appointed to preside on the spot, to whom the governors of each colony shall be subordinate;” that the council or assembly of each province elect annually two delegates “to a great council or general convention of the estates of the colonies;” that the latter “consult and advise for the good of the whole.” “A coalition or union of this nature,” adds Daniel Coxe, in his earnest argument for it, “tempered with and grounded on prudence, moderation, and justice, and a generous encouragement given to the labor, industry, and good management of all sorts and conditions of persons, . . . will, in all probability, lay a sure and lasting foundation of dominion, strength, and trade, sufficient not only to secure and promote the prosperity of the plantations, but to revive and greatly increase the late flourishing state and condition of Great Britain.”¹

     JONATHAN DICKINSON was born at Hatfield, Massachusetts, in 1688; and was graduated at Yale College, in 1706. In 1708, he went to Elizabethtown, New Jersey; and there, for the subsequent thirty-nine years, he lived a most energetic life, as minister, physician, educator, and author,

displaying great ability in all these spheres, and acquiring a commanding influence through the whole land. He was a leader in ecclesiastical politics in the middle colonies; he was a fascinating and mighty pulpit-orator; he was the principal founder of the College of New Jersey, and its first president; in person he was of so saintly and impressive an aspect, “that the wicked seemed to tremble in his presence;”¹ his long life was so pure, consistent, and noble, that “the memory of it is still fragrant on the spot where he lived,” and the descendants “of those who knew and loved him cherish an hereditary reverence for his name and his grave.”²

     He was a voluminous author, his chief distinction pointing toward skill in theological controversy. He had the talent of a logician; he was an intrepid debater; as a protagonist for Calvinism, he stood in reputation among American theologians of his time, next to Jonathan Edwards; and a great Scottish divine³ testified that even “the British Isles had produced no such writers on divinity in the eighteenth century,” as were these two men,—both born on the confines of the New England forests, and both bred at Yale College.

     Perhaps the most interesting specimen of his literary and dialectical gifts, is his “Familiar Letters to a Gentleman, upon a Variety of seasonable and important Subjects in Religion;”⁴ in which are these sentences, portraying the logical difficulties to be assumed by any one who shall reject the historical verity of the New Testament: “If this history be not true, then all the known laws of nature were changed; all the motives and incentives to human actions, that ever had obtained in the world, have been entirely inverted; the wickedest men in the world have taken the greatest pains and endured the greatest hardship and misery,

to invent, practise, and propagate the most holy religion that ever was; and not only the apostles and first preachers of the gospel, but whole nations of men and all sorts of men, Christian, Jew, and pagan, were—nobody can imagine how or why—confederated to propagate a known cheat, against their own honor, interest, and safety; and multitudes of men, without any prospect of advantage, here or hereafter, were brought most constantly and tenaciously to profess what they knew to be false, to exchange all the comforts and pleasures of life for shame and contempt, for banishments, scourgings, imprisonments, and death; in a word, voluntarily to expose themselves to be hated both of God and man, and that without any known motive whatsoever.”¹

     In the year 1747, was published in New York a little book entitled “Philosophic Solitude; or, The Choice of a Rural Life,“a poem of nearly seven hundred lines, announcing itself as the production of “a gentleman educated at Yale College.” This gentleman proved to be William Livingston, then twenty-four years old, just beginning the practice of the law in New York, and destined to a long and illustrious career as a statesman in the era of the Revolution. During his whole life, he was absorbed in stormy and agitating public movements; yet he found time to retain an uncommon intimacy with the best literature, and to exercise in many ways his own remarkable aptitude for literary work. This poem is obviously the effort of a rhyming apprentice, still in bondage to the methods of his master, Alexander Pope; yet he catches the knack of his master with a cleverness proving the possibility of original work, on his own account, by and by. It illustrates, likewise, a trait of human nature, that this young lawyer and politician, having given himself to a

practical career in the thick of the world’s affairs, and one made tumultuous by his own aggressive spirit, should have begun it by depicting, in enthusiastic verse, his preference for a life of absolute retirement and serene meditation:

     He then pictures for us the situation of the home in the country, in which he would spend his tranquil life, its furniture, its surroundings; he sings over again his love of solitude; he mentions the sort of friends whom he would have within call; he portrays the frame of devotion and calm contemplation which should abide with him. His hermitage should be far from

     There, he would

     He would have books for his most intimate friends; he would have Virgil as prince of the classic bards; he would be surrounded by Milton, Pope, Dryden, and “the gentle Watts;” also, by Locke, Raleigh, Denham; among philosophers, he would give the place of honor to Newton. Moreover, he would alleviate his solitude by the presence of a

wife. This being should be none of those “ideal goddesses” who

     She is to be not an ideal goddess, but a literal one, an absolutely faultless being, who having accepted his addresses becomes, he says,

     He then reaches the climax of his poem by depicting the crowning experience of his “philosophic solitude”—a solitude the peculiar rigors of which would not seem to have required a vast exertion of philosophy to endure:

     The voluptuous languors of this poem, report a quality in the author that did not control him; and henceforward, through nearly half a century, his real life was a battle for stern and great ideas. He was of Scottish ancestry; and if he had within him the romantic intensity of his race, he had likewise its intellectual ruggedness, its iron grasp of conviction, its unsubmissiveness, its onrushing and most fervid pleasure in strife, its nerve of invincible endurance,—a double strain sent down to him from the old Scottish ballad-makers and from the old Scottish covenanters. The practice of his profession did not consume his energy; he was felt, as a pamphleteer and as a journalist,

in all the topics that came up for debate in the colony in those years, especially those connected with the denominational control of King’s College, with military operations, and with the establishment of an American Episcopate. He was a resolute member of the Reformed Dutch Church. By his newspaper articles against the efforts of the Episcopalians to obtain the mastery of King’s College, he had brought upon himself the charges of atheism, deism, and Presbyterianism; and with reference to these imputations, he retorted upon his opponents with his usual wit and vigor, in a travesty on the Thirty-nine Articles: “1. I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, without any foreign comments or human explanations but my own; for which I should, doubtless, be honored with martyrdom, did I not live in a government which restrains that fiery zeal which would reduce a man’s body to ashes, for the illumination of his understanding. . . . 5. I believe that the word orthodox is a hard, equivocal, priestly term that has caused the effusion of more blood than all the Roman emperors put together. . . . 7. I believe that to defend the Christian religion is one thing, and to knock a man on the head for being of a different opinion is another thing. . . . 11. I believe that he who feareth God and worketh righteousness, will be accepted of Him, even though he refuse to worship any man or order of men into the bargain. . . . 13. I believe that riches, ornaments, and ceremonies were assumed by churches for the same reason that garments were invented by our first parents. . . . 15. I believe that a man may be a good Christian, though he be of no sect in Christendom. . . . 17. I believe that our faith, like our stomachs, may be overcharged, especially if we are prohibited to chew what we are commanded to swallow. . . . 38. I believe that the virulence of some of the clergy against my speculations, proceeds not from their affection to Christianity, which is founded on too firm a basis to be shaken by the freest inquiry, and the divine authority of which I sincerely

believe,—without receiving a farthing for saying so; but from an apprehension of bringing into contempt their ridiculous claims and unreasonable pretensions, which may justly tremble at the slightest scrutiny, and which I believe I shall more and more put into a panic, in defiance of both press and pulpit.”¹

     His most serious effort as a prose writer, during this period of our literary history, was “A Review of the Military Operations in North America,” from 1753 to 1756. This work is in the form of a letter addressed to a nobleman, and was first published, without the author’s name, in London, in the year 1756. Its historical value is considerable,—principally, as embalming the fury of partisanship that raged, at that time, between the great families of the colony of New York, and that drew within its folds the reputations of Sir William Johnson on the one hand, and of Governor William Shirley on the other. As a literary work, the book rises far above the mob of political pamphlets. Though somewhat lacking in concentration, it is written with much elegance; and it is especially remarkable for its elaborate portraits of the great men of the day. The painter of these portraits makes no pretence of impartiality, but tints his canvas at will with the frankness of his love or of his hate.

     It is not disagreeable to be reminded, once more, of the tender and gallant vein that streaked the nature of this robust political combatant; and to find that, even amid the rancors of his strenuous career, there were moods in which he could dash off verses so graceful and so sprightly as these:

     WILLIAM SMITH was the son of an eminent lawyer of New York, where he was born in 1728. He was graduated

at Yale College, in 1745. Devoting himself to the professions of law and of politics, he speedily rose to distinction in both. During the Revolutionary War, he was a loyalist; in 1783, he went to England, and three years later, was rewarded for his fidelity to the crown, by the appointment of chief-justice of Canada. In Canada, he died in 1793.

     While still a very young man, he gave great attention to the legal and political records of his native province,—an experience that led him to write a “History of New York, from the First Discovery to the Year 1732.” This work, which was first published in London, in 1757,¹ is a strong and clear piece of work, with the tone of a scholar and a gentleman, somewhat dashed by provincialism. Himself a New York politician, and the son of one, it was not easy for him, in dealing with the story of New York politics, wholly to suppress his partisan prejudices; and his narrative, as he admitted, “deserves not the name of a history.”² It is an able and sturdy historical pamphlet, aggravated by vast public documents quoted in bulk. Although he believed that in his book the laws of truth had not been infringed, either “by positive assertions, oblique, insidious hints, wilful suppressions, or corrupt misrepresentations,” and that in his writing of it he had chosen “rather to be honest and dull than agreeable and false,”³ he was charged by a contemporary, Cadwallader Colden,⁴ with having “wilfully misrepresented” some things; while in our own time, the ablest of the historians of New York, John Romeyn Brodhead,⁵ has declared that, in several instances, William Smith gave utterance to “fabulous” statements.

     In his book, it is interesting to note the tokens of American sensitiveness, even in that age, to the infinite and serene ignorance prevalent among the people of England

concerning their own plantations in America: “The main body of the people conceive of these plantations under the idea of wild, boundless, inhospitable, uncultivated deserts; and hence, the punishment of transportation hither, in the judgment of most, is thought not much less severe than an infamous death.”¹ His portraits of the long line of royal governors who had in succession preyed upon the province, are drawn with the vivacity of genuine feeling; in the ardor of his filial pride and affection, he has painted a glowing picture of the learning and eloquence of his own father;² and his sketches of society in New York in his time, particularly of the steady preference there of the pursuits of wealth to those of mere knowledge, have a courageous authenticity, perhaps not altogether obsolete even yet.³

     In the year 1765, was published “The History of the Colony of Nova Cæsarea, or New Jersey;” the author being Samuel Smith, an honest, solid Quaker, a native of the region that he wrote about, himself then forty-five years old. His book is a dry, ponderous performance, a compilation of dull documents and dull facts; the whole written, doubtless, with great patience, and only to be read by an abundant exercise of the same virtue.

     A sagacious English student of American history has said that “the most remarkable of the American colonies after the New England group, is Pennsylvania.”⁴ In spite of all outward differences, of all mutual dislikes, there was an inward kinship between the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Puritans of New England. “I came for the Lord’s

sake,” said William Penn, in 1682.¹ “Our business here in this new land,” said one of the first Pennsylvanians, “is not so much to build houses, and establish factories, and promote trade and manufactures that may enrich ourselves, . . . as to erect temples of holiness and righteousness, which God may delight in; to lay such lasting foundations of temperance and virtue, as may support the superstructures of our future happiness, both in this and the other world.”²

     The society that these men founded in Pennsylvania was, of course, serious, laborious, economic, monotonous, prim, especially pained by the pleasures of existence. Thomas Chalkley abhorred music as a thing “of evil consequence;” he denounced cards “as engines of Satan;” and of dancing he said, that “as many paces or steps as the man or woman takes in the dance, so many paces or steps they take toward hell.”³

     On the other hand, William Penn was a man of great intellectual foresight, and swayed by a passion to be both just and humane; and he began by inoculating his young commonwealth with the idea of civic generosity: “We have, with reverence to God and good conscience to men, to the best of our skill contrived and composed the frame of this government to the great end of all government,—to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power.”⁴ “Whoever is right,” said he, “the persecutor must be wrong.”⁵ From the beginning, a part of the fundamental law of Pennsylvania was the law of liberty for the souls of men. Through every turnpike in that province, ideas travelled toll-free.

     But were there, in that province, any ideas inclined to travel? The founder of Quakerism, being himself able to

get all necessary wisdom by the facility of an inward flash, quite naturally despised those who had to get it by the slow process of study; he despised books, also, and schools; and he declared that “God stood in no need of human learning.”¹ William Penn, however, and many of his associates in the settlement of Pennsylvania, had never yielded to that barbaric mood of their religious teacher; and being themselves men of considerable learning,² they at once devised means for the spread of learning among others. “Before the pines had been cleared from the ground,” they “began to build schools and set up a printing-press.”³ It was their noble ambition, “inter silvas quaerere verum.”⁴ The first school in Pennsylvania was founded during the first year of the existence of Pennsylvania; and in the sixth year of its existence, there was in Philadelphia an academy at which even those who had no money, might get knowledge without price.

     The first impulse to the production of any sort of literature in Pennsylvania was given by a desire to publish through the world the advantages of that commonwealth. Very soon, the fierceness of religious controversy set other pens to work,—though with results too crude and too brutal to be called literature. Science, also, and the slavery-question, and the Indian-question prompted others to write. Near the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century,—about the time that Benjamin Franklin commenced his career there,—Philadelphia, though still dominated by the Quakers, had become the seat of a large population who were not Quakers; it had something of the liberal tone of a metropolis,—where men of cultivation, of vivacity, of literary aptitude, had begun to realize

the presence of one another, and of a common literary purpose. By the close of the colonial age, Philadelphia had grown to be the centre of a literary activity more vital and more versatile than was to be seen anywhere else upon the continent, except at Boston. In the ancient library of Philadelphia, there are “four hundred and twenty-five original books and pamphlets that were printed in that city before the Revolution.”¹

     In 1681, in the first ship that sailed from England to the great American province of William Penn, was the pleasant Quaker, Gabriel Thomas, who, for the next seventeen years, lent a strong and willing hand to the task of building up there a generous drab commonwealth; and who returning to England in 1698, probably for a brief visit, carried with him and published in London, in that year, “An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pennsylvania and of West New Jersey.” The book, which is written with Quaker-like frankness and simplicity, and with an undercurrent of playfulness not exactly Quaker-like, is full of information for the guidance of the poor in the old world to a good refuge in the new; and in the author’s opinion, no better spot could be found anywhere along the vast American coast than that happily obtained by William Penn: “For though this country has made little noise in story. or taken up but small room in maps, yet, . . . the mighty improvements . . . that have been made lately there, are well worth communicating to the public. . . . This noble spot of earth will thrive exceedingly.”² “The air here is very delicate, pleasant, and wholesome; the heavens serene, rarely o’ercast, bearing mighty resemblance to the better part of France.”³ In delineating the

natural characteristics of the country, he passes now and then into a semi-facetious intensity, into a droll largeness of statement, from which even the demureness of his sect did not save him, and which thus early show themselves as traits of American humor; saying, for example, that the bullfrog in Pennsylvania “makes a roaring noise hardly to be distinguished from that well known of the beast from whom it takes its name.”¹ His pictures of the new social conditions formed there, have elements of uncommon attractiveness; as when he remarks: “Of lawyers and physicians I shall say nothing, because this country is very peaceable and healthy. Long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the tongue of the one nor the pen of the other, both equally destructive of men’s estates and lives.”²

     Once again, also, we catch in this book the tender American note of sympathy with men and women in Europe who have a hard lot there; a cheery voice from this side of the Atlantic sounding out clear above the countless laughter of its billows, and telling all who need a new chance in life that at last they can have it: “Reader, what I have here written is not a fiction, flam, whim, or any sinister design, either to impose upon the ignorant or credulous, or to curry favor with the rich and mighty; but in mere pity and pure compassion to the numbers of poor laboring men, women, and children in England—half-starved visible in their meagre looks—that are continually wandering up and down, looking for employment without finding any, who here need not lie idle a moment, nor want due encouragement or reward for their work, much less vagabond or drone it about. Here are no beggars to be seen, . . . nor, indeed, have any here the least occasion or temptation to take up that scandalous lazy life.”³

     A desire to bear public testimony to the delights and benefits of life in Pennsylvania, took possession of several

others among its first inhabitants; and unfortunately, in some cases, this testimony sought utterance in verse. Thus, Richard Frame, probably a Quaker, published at Philadelphia, in 1692, “A Short Description of Pennsylvania; or, A relation what things are known, enjoyed, and like to be discovered in the said province.”¹ So, also, John Holme, who came to Pennsylvania in 1686, and died there about the year 1701, wrote “A True Relation of the Flourishing State of Pennsylvania.”² Both of these works are very slight as specimens of descriptive literature; and as examples of verse, they scarcely rise to the puerile—they approach the idiotic.

     A piece of narration and description, happily in honest prose, and having the merit of being uncommonly interesting, is “God’s Protecting Providence Man’s surest Help and Defence in Times of greatest Difficulty and most eminent Danger,” by Jonathan Dickenson, an English Quaker of property and education, who, after some sojourn in Jamaica, sailed thence, in 1696, for Pennsylvania, having with him his wife, an infant child, and several negro servants. On the voyage, they were cast away on the coast of Florida, and after suffering almost incredible hardships, not only “from the devouring waves of the sea” but “also from the cruel, devouring jaws of the inhumane cannibals of Florida,” they made their way to Philadelphia. Of this frightful and most afflictive experience, Dickenson wrote an account, under the title already given,—telling his story in a modest, straight-forward, manly way, like a hero and a Christian. He remained in Pennsylvania the rest of his life, became chief-justice of the province, and died there in 1722.³

     In 1699, when William Penn was on the point of sailing for the second time to his province, he became deeply interested in a young Irishman of Scottish descent, named James Logan, who, though highly educated, and with strong aptitudes for literary and scientific pursuits, had recently embarked in trade at Bristol. Penn saw in this young man one whom he could safely lean upon, and whom he greatly needed; and after urgent solicitation, Logan gave up his own plans, and putting his fate into Penn’s keeping, went with him to America. There he remained all the rest of his days; and there he died in 1751, at the age of seventy-seven.

     That second visit of William Penn to Pennsylvania proved, also, to be his last; and when, in 1701, he went on board the ship that was to carry him away from the province forever, he wrote these words to the man whom he had commissioned to stand there in his place: “I have left thee in an uncommon trust, with a singular dependence on thy justice and care, which I expect thou wilt faithfully employ in advancing my honest interest. . . . For thy own services I shall allow thee what is just and reasonable. . . . Serve me faithfully as thou expects a blessing from God, or my favor, and I shall support thee to my utmost, as thy true friend.”¹ Thenceforward, James Logan’s letters to his patron and to his patron’s family, are the letters of a man who deserved such trust; for he served them with flawless fidelity.

     His office proved to be a most laborious and vexatious one. Year by year his troubles as Penn’s agent thickened. In 1704, he wrote to his master: “I wish thou could be here thyself, for I cannot bear up under all these hardships;

they break my rest, and I doubt will sink me at last. . . . I have been so true to thee, that I am not just to myself; and had I now a family, it would appear that there has scarce been a greater knave in America to another’s affairs, than I have been to my own.”¹

     But though James Logan was through all his life thus faithful to the proprietors of Pennsylvania, he was never unfaithful to the people of Pennsylvania. He held in succession the leading offices in the province; from 1736 to 1738, as president of the council, he was really governor; and while, at times, he drew upon himself great unpopularity, he served the people better than they knew, in all their highest interests, in peace and even in war.

     His long life and his great influence went especially for the public enlightenment; and in all possible ways he helped to build up good literature in Pennsylvania. His own intellectual accomplishments were extraordinary. Almost from childhood he had been familiar with the principal languages, ancient and modern; at the age of sixteen he began that enthusiastic study of the higher mathematics which he prosecuted all his life; and there seemed to be no topic in science or literature that did not have his attention. He carried on an extensive correspondence with the most illustrious scholars in Europe and America; and in these letters as well as in the mass of private papers that he left behind him, he discussed, with originality and precision, the leading subjects that then engaged the minds of learned men. “Sometimes Hebrew or Arabic characters and algebraic formulas roughen the pages of his letter-books. Sometimes his letters convey a lively Greek ode to a learned friend; and often they are written in the Latin tongue.”²

     The larger part of his writings still remain unprinted;

but during his lifetime were published, besides several Latin treatises by him upon scientific subjects, his “Translation of Cato’s Distichs into English Verse,” and his more celebrated translation of “M. T. Cicero’s Cato Major; or, Discourse on Old Age,”—works that not only denoted his own elegant literary taste, but also tended to develop such taste in others. His correspondence with the Penn family, from 1700 to 1750, has been recently made public;¹ and though much of it is taken up with uninteresting details respecting business and politics, it is also a great storehouse of information respecting men and manners in Pennsylvania during that period. Everywhere this correspondence reveals the carefulness and the intellectual breadth of James Logan; and occasionally one finds in it a passage of general discussion, in which the clear brain and the noble heart of the writer utter themselves in language of real beauty and force.²

     In 1751, the very year in which James Logan died, there came to America another man of the same Scottish stock, and of the same Scottish vigor for various intellectual work, who, in the middle colonies, and especially in Pennsylvania, was to carry forward, during the second half of the eighteenth century, many of the wholesome scientific and literary influences with which the life of James Logan had been identified, during the first half of that century. This man was William Smith, born at Aberdeen about 1726, and graduated at its university in 1747. In New York, where he spent the first two years after his arrival in America, he found the leading men greatly occupied with the project of founding a college there; and in the discussion of this subject he skilfully participated by publishing “A General Idea of the College of Mirania,” a

sort of educational romance, written in graceful style, and unfolding with much vigor the author’s notions of what a college in America should be.

     A copy of the book soon fell under the eye of Benjamin Franklin, who was, at that time, also deeply engaged in plans for a college at Philadelphia; and was even then looking about for some one competent to take charge of it. Not long afterward, the ambitious young Scotchman was invited to Philadelphia for that purpose. He immediately went to England for holy orders; and returning to Philadelphia in 1754, he entered upon his duties at the head of the institution which, in the following year, took the name of a college. From that time onward until his death in 1803, William Smith, as educator, politician, clergyman, and man of letters, was a tireless, facile, and powerful representative in Philadelphia of the higher intellectual interests of society. Under his care the little college grew apace; and by his own example as an eloquent writer, by his enthusiasm for good literature, and by his quick and genial recognition of literary merit in the young men who were growing up around him, he did a great work for the literary development of his adopted country.¹

     We find in Pennsylvania, during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, a succession of persons swayed somewhat by literary inclinations, and addicted, in a small and rather amateur way, to literary utterance, in prose or rhyme.

     One of these persons was Jacob Taylor, who served the public in the various capacities of school-master, surveyor, doctor, almanac-maker, and poet. His verses usually

appeared in his almanacs; and it is said¹ that, “in harmony and spirit,” some of them “nearly approached to the poetry of standard authors.” One of his poems is entitled “Pennsylvania;” another, “The Story of Whackum,” being a satire on country quacks. He died in 1736.

     A man of considerable sprightliness and social grace was Henry Brooke, younger son of Sir Henry Brooke of Cheshire, for some time collector of customs in Pennsylvania, and during many years a leading politician in the province. In 1704, James Logan, in a letter to William Penn, described him as “a young man of the most polite education and best natural parts . . . thrown away on this corner of the world.”² His gift as a writer of smooth and spirited verse may be seen in a little poem of his addressed to Robert Gracie, and entitled “A Discourse of Jests.”³

     Many of these small writers would have found long since the repose in utter oblivion to which they have so valid a claim, had it not been for such incidental mention as is made of them by Franklin, in his “Autobiography.” Thus, he records that, on his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, he sought employment in the printing-office of one Samuel Keimer, a long-bearded, semi-literary, very mystical, and altogether preposterous adventurer, whom he found engaged in putting into type an elegy composed by the printer himself, on one Aquila Rose, also a printer and poet, who had but recently died. The latter was of English birth and education; and after his death, at the age of twenty-eight, “many of his best pieces” were loaned by his widow to her friends, and in consequence were lost; but in 1741, such of his verses as could then be obtained were collected by his son, Joseph Rose, and published in a pamphlet, under the title of “Poems on Several Occasions.”

     James Ralph, probably born in America and near the beginning of the eighteenth century, was another of that group of witlings and poetasters whose names are strung like glass beads upon the thread of Franklin’s story of his own early career in Philadelphia. At the time of Franklin’s first appearance upon the scene, Ralph was a young fellow of fine appearance, glib tongue, poetic aspirations, and superficial accomplishments. In 1724, he resolved to give the British metropolis the benefit of his talents. Being then encumbered with a wife and a young child, but not with a conscience, he quietly abandoned the former, and with Franklin for a companion, went to London as a literary adventurer, where, with sharp alternations of poverty and prosperity, he remained the rest of his life, a prolific and notorious literary hack; emitting with incontinent speed political pamphlets, newspaper articles, odes, epics, plays, satires, and histories; achieving the ludicrous immortality of a niche in Pope’s pantheon of dunces;¹ and honored long after his death by the strong applause of Charles James Fox.² From the moment of his first arrival in London, however, Ralph succeeded so perfectly in casting off all topics that were connected with his native country and in taking on all those themes and modes that were peculiar to a London Bohemian, that his remarkable career as a writer seems to have no significance in relation to American literature. We cordially surrender him, therefore, to the exclusive possession of our English kinsmen.

     On Franklin’s return from the expedition that he had made to London in the company of James Ralph, he found in Keimer’s printing-office, “in the situation of a bought servant,” one George Webb, “an Oxford scholar,” and a native of Gloucester, England, who, having run away from college and fallen into distress in London, had obtained passage to Philadelphia on condition of doing four years’

service after his arrival there. “He was lively, witty, good-natured, and a pleasant companion, but idle, thoughtless, and imprudent to the last degree.”¹ He had a smattering of knowledge and some cleverness at verse-making; and having made his way into respectable society, he appears to have attracted considerable local attention by the merry, little poems that he dashed off frequently enough. One of these is a poem of about a hundred lines, published by Franklin in 1736, and entitled “Bachelors’ Hall.” The name of the poem was that of a famous club-house built in the fields in Kensington by a set of Philadelphia bachelors, and long held in ill repute as the supposed seat of gluttonous and lascivious revels.² Webb’s poem was an effort to placate public opinion, on behalf of the offending edifice:

     At least one more of Franklin’s early literary companions must be named by us,—Joseph Breintnal, “a copyer of deeds for the scriveners, a good-natured, friendly, middle-aged man, a great lover of poetry, reading all he could meet with, and writing some that was tolerable, very ingenious in many little knickknackeries, and of sensible conversation.”¹ When Franklin undertook to write for a weekly newspaper, a series of didactic and satirical essays called “The Busy Body,” he was assisted in the work by the friendly pen of Breintnal, who, in fact, continued the series for several months after Franklin had ceased to take an interest in it.²

     In “Titan’s Almanac” for 1730 is an anonymous poem in praise of Pennsylvania, which may interest us still, not only as a token of the ordinary poetic manner of that time and place, but especially for its reference to the literary preëminence then attained, or confidently expected, on the part of Philadelphia:

     A daintier poetic skill was reached by a later poet of Philadelphia, Joseph Shippen, who wrote so well that in his case we experience the unwonted regret that he did not write more. His most famous poem is a love-song, “The Glooms of Ligonier,” published in 1759, and popular for many years afterward.¹ He also wrote some graceful verses on seeing a portrait, painted by Benjamin West, of a beautiful young lady. In this poem, having first extolled the exquisite charm of the portrait itself, he is upon the point of charging the artist with an exaggeration of the beauty of the original:

     About the year 1741, John Webbe published in Philadelphia the first of an intended series of tracts, on the financial questions that agitated the American colonies during many war-making and wasteful years. He entitled his essay, “A Discourse concerning Paper-money.” The style is compact and clear; but the literary merit of the production is unimportant by comparison with the argumentative feat that the author professes to have accomplished in it, namely, the demonstration of “a method, plain and easy, for introducing and continuing a plenty” of paper-money,”without lessening the present value of it.”

     In 1755, Lewis Evans, a surveyor in Pennsylvania, in order to help the public to understand the bearings of the strife, then waxing hot, between the English and

the French for possession of the American continent, published “A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America;” and, at the same time, an “Analysis”¹ of the map, in the form of a descriptive and argumentative essay, written with fulness of knowledge, and rising, toward the end, to a statesmanly view of the whole problem then coming to a solution by the two races.

     Probably the most brilliant pulpit-orator produced in the colonial time, south of New England, was Samuel Davies, born in Newcastle County, Delaware, in 1723. His classical education was obtained chiefly at the famous school founded by Samuel Blair, at Fogg’s Manor, in Chester County; and there, also, he pursued the study of theology. He began to preach in 1746; and in the following year, he visited Virginia, where his earnestness, his imaginative rhetoric, and his impassioned elocution won for him a sudden and extensive popularity. In 1748, he accepted an invitation to settle in that colony; and during the subsequent five years, what before was popularity deepened into fame and a most benign influence, and filled the whole country. In 1753, in the company of Gilbert Tennent, he went to England to solicit aid for the College of New Jersey. He remained there about eleven months, having great success in his mission, and winning for himself high reputation as an orator. On his return, he resumed his labors in Virginia. In 1759, he succeeded Jonathan Edwards as president of the College of New Jersey; and upon him there fell the fate of speedy death, which, for a time, seemed to be the inevitable portion of those who should accept that office. He died in 1761.

     During his life, many of his sermons were published, and were widely diffused. One of them, preached in Virginia,

in 1755, shortly after the defeat of General Braddock, is remarkable for its prophetic allusion to the destiny of George Washington: “I may point out to the public that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner, for some important service to his country.”¹ Not long after his death, a collection of his sermons was published in three large volumes; and these have been repeatedly printed since that time.²

     A glance at any page of these discourses reveals the fact that the author of them was, above all other things, an orator. He prepared his sermons with the utmost care; for he “always thought it to be a most awful thing to go into the pulpit and there speak nonsense in the name of God.” What he prepared, however, was meant for the ear rather than for the eye. He had all the physical qualifications for oratory—voice, gesture, temperament; and in appearance he was so commanding that “he looked like the ambassador of some great king.” As uttered by himself, these discourses must have been vivid and thrilling orations; but they suffer from the revelations of type. The thought is often loose; the imagery is sometimes confused; the sentences are frequently swollen into verbosity.

     As we read, however, some of his eloquent sentences,—for example, these from his sermon on “The General Resurrection,”—we may easily imagine ourselves in the presence of the orator himself, and borne away beyond criticism, on the tide of his heroic faith and his passionate declamation: “They shall come forth. Now methinks I see, I hear, the earth heaving, charnel-houses rattling, tombs bursting, graves opening. Now the nations under ground begin to stir. There is a noise and a shaking

among the dry bones. The dust is all alive, and in motion, and the globe breaks and trembles, as with an earthquake, while this vast army is working its way through and bursting into life. The ruins of human bodies are scattered far and wide, and have passed through many and surprising transformations. A limb in one country, and another in another; here the head and there the trunk, and the ocean rolling between. Multitudes have sunk in a watery grave, been swallowed up by the monsters of the deep, and transformed into a part of their flesh. Multitudes have been eaten by beasts and birds of prey, and incorporated with them; and some have been devoured by their fellow-men in the rage of a desperate hunger, or of unnatural cannibal appetite, and digested into a part of them. Multitudes have mouldered into dust, and this dust has been blown about by winds, and washed away with water, or it has petrified into stone, or been burnt into brick to form dwellings for their posterity; or it has grown up in grain, trees, plants, and other vegetables, which are the support of man and beast, and are transformed into their flesh and blood. But through all these various transformations and changes, not a particle that was essential to one human body has been lost, or incorporated with another human body, so as to become an essential part of it. . . . The omniscient God knows how to collect, distinguish, and compound all those scattered and mingled seeds of our mortal bodies. And now, at the sound of the trumpet, they shall all be collected, wherever they were scattered; all properly sorted and united, however they were confused; atom to its fellow-atom, bone to its fellow-bone. Now methinks you may see the air darkened with fragments of bodies flying from country to country to meet and join their proper parts. . . . Then, my brethren, your dust and mine shall be reanimated and organized. . . . And what a vast improvement will the frail nature of man then receive? Our bodies will then be substantially the same; but how different in qualities, in

strength, in agility, in capacities for pleasure or pain, in beauty or deformity, in glory or terror, according to the moral character of the person to whom they belong! . . . The bodies of the saints will be formed glorious, incorruptible, without the seeds of sickness and death. . . . Then will the body be able to bear up under the exceeding great and eternal weight of glory; it will no longer be a clog or an incumbrance to the soul, but a proper instrument and assistant in all the exalted services and enjoyments of the heavenly state. The bodies of the wicked will also be improved, but their improvements will all be terrible and vindictive. Their capacities will be thoroughly enlarged, but then it will be that they may be made capable of greater misery; they will be strengthened, but it will be that they may bear the heavier load of torment. Their sensations will be more quick and strong, but it will be that they may feel the more exquisite pain. They will be raised immortal that they may not be consumed by everlasting fire, or escape punishment by dissolution or annihilation. In short, their augmented strength, their enlarged capacities, and their immortality, will be their eternal curse; and they would willingly exchange them for the fleeting duration of a fading flower, or the faint sensations of an infant. The only power they would rejoice in is that of self-annihilation.”¹

     Upon the fascinating pages of Franklin’s “Autobiography,” one meets several times the name of an ingenious and philosophical glazier of Philadelphia, named Thomas Godfrey. It was this glazier and his family, who, upon Franklin’s return to Philadelphia after his first pilgrimage to London, shared with the economical young printer the space and the expense of his hired house

“near the market;” it was the wife of this glazier, who, with much feminine diplomacy, tried to make a match between Franklin and one of her own relations, and was so offended at Franklin’s intractableness in the affair, that she and her family removed from his house; again, it was the glazier himself who, in 1744, was enrolled as “a mathematician” among the nine original members of the American Philosophical Society.¹

     Among the children of this astute and worthy man, was a son, likewise named Thomas, who left such proofs of poetic genius, that his name will always have a prominent place in the story of our colonial literature. The expression of his genius, however, was inadequate; for he had the three misfortunes—stinted education, poverty, an early death. He was born at Philadelphia, in 1736. Being left an orphan at the age of thirteen, he was soon taken from school and apprenticed to a watch-maker—a trade that he did not like. His heart was in music, and especially in poetry; and to these he gave whatever time he could purloin from the business that was to him a servitude. In 1758, having reached his majority, he became a lieutenant in the Pennsylvania militia and served through the campaign that resulted that year in the capture by the English of Fort Duquesne. In 1759, he went to North Carolina, and remained there under engagement as a factor for three years. At the end of that time, being still unsettled, he made journeys to Philadelphia and to New Providence; then returned to North Carolina; and there, on the third of August, 1763, he suddenly died. Two years after his death, his writings, collected and edited by another young poet, Nathaniel Evans, were published at Philadelphia under this title: “Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects; with the Prince of Parthia, a Tragedy.”

     The poems called “juvenile,” doubtless deserve that term. They have no original manner or matter; they are

merely tentative and preparatory; those of them that failed to receive correction from his scholarly friends, reveal, in their imperfect metre, false accent, and false syntax, his own lack of scholarship. The topics are the usual ones in the case of poetic fledglings: “A Cure for Love;” “Ode on Friendship;” “A Dithyrambic on Wine.” There are also some pastorals, and as many as seven or eight love-songs; and besides these, an ambitious and not discreditable poem in pentameter couplets, entitled “The Court of Fancy,” obviously suggested by Chaucer and Pope.

     These alone would not have gained for Thomas Godfrey any remembrance. There is in the volume, however, a tragedy—the first drama, probably, ever produced in this country—that has very considerable, merit, and assures us of the presence in him of a constructive genius in poetry from which, very likely, great things would have come, had the stars befriended him.

     This poem is in blank verse. It is an oriental story of love and lust, of despotism, ambition, and jealousy. A certain king of Parthia, Artabanus, has three sons. The eldest, Arsaces, is a military hero and an idol of the populace; he is also the object of consuming envy on the part of the second son, Vardanes, and of loyal affection on the part of the third son, Gotarzes. The first scene is in the temple of the sun, and represents the joy of this youngest son, over a great victory recently gained by the Prince Arsaces in a battle with the Arabians. The second scene represents the envious brother, Vardanes, and his friend Lysias, as talking together of the rage they both felt at the success of Arsaces and at his enormous popularity. In the course of this conversation, it appears that Vardanes is in love with a beautiful Arabian captive, named Evanthe, who, however, is betrothed to Arsaces. The third scene introduces the queen, Thermusa, who reveals to an attendant her hatred of Arsaces and her desire for his destruction; likewise, her wrath at the beautiful captive, Evanthe, with whom the king himself has fallen in love. In the

fourth scene, Evanthe herself appears, and talks with her maid, Cleone, of the popular enthusiasm for her beloved Arsaces, and of her own eagerness for his return:

     In this conversation, while waiting for her lover, Evanthe tells the story of her early life and of her captivity. Her father, a high officer at court, and a great general,

     One day, while

     Her captor, a cruel and lustful wretch, was afterward killed in battle by Arsaces, and thus Evanthe fell into his gallant keeping. In this scene, hearing that other Arabian captives had been brought in from the recent battle, she desires to get news of her father. The fifth scene presents the king in state, surrounded by his princes and officers, and in the act of reproaching a brave Arabian captive, named Bethas, who is before him in chains. To the king’s hard words, Bethas answers

     The king grants the request of his eldest son, and Bethas is sent to prison. Thus closes the first Act. The second Act opens with a scene wherein the malignant brother, Vardanes, is contriving with Lysias a plot to destroy Arsaces. Their plan is to induce the king to believe that Arsaces is intending to slay him and to win the throne, and that the intercession of the prince on behalf of Bethas was for the purpose of securing the help of that great soldier. The talk of the two conspirators is by night, and in the gloomy prison, of which Lysias has charge; and it proceeds in the midst of a fearful storm:

     It is on this conspiracy, hatched by night and amid the storm, that the plot turns. From that point, the action moves on swiftly; the entanglements and cross-purposes and astute villanies are well presented; Bethas proves to be the father of Evanthe; the conspirators nearly succeed; they murder the king and are about to murder Arsaces and Bethas, and they have Evanthe in their power, when suddenly, the youngest brother arrives with a great army. A battle is fought in the streets of the city. Evanthe sends Cleone to a tower to see how the contest is going, and especially, to ascertain the fate of Arsaces. Cleone sees a hero slain, whom she mistakes for Arsaces, and rushes down with the dreadful news. Upon this, Evanthe

takes poison; Arsaces, who has won the battle, rushes in, and the beautiful maiden dies in his arms. At once he kills himself; and the kingdom passes to the loyal and loving brother, Gotarzes.

     The whole drama is powerful in diction and in action. Of course, there are blemishes in it,—faults of inexperience and of imperfect culture: but it has many noble poetic passages; the characters are firmly and consistently developed; there are scenes of pathos and tragic vividness; the plot advances with rapid movement and with culminating force. Thomas Godfrey was a true poet; and “The Prince of Parthia” is a noble beginning of dramatic literature in America.

     On the tenth of May, 1762, David Hume writing from Edinburgh to Benjamin Franklin in London, used these words: “I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere. America has sent us many good things, gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, and so forth; but you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to her.”¹ Even eight years before that time, an eminent French scholar, in sending to Franklin, at Philadelphia, the greetings of Buffon, Fonferrière, Marty, and the other great savans of Paris, had added this testimony,—“Your name is venerated in this country.”²

     Thus, before the close of its colonial epoch, America had produced one man of science and of letters who had reached cosmopolitan fame. Yet, within the period here treated of, the renown of Franklin was that of a great scientific experimenter, rather than of a great writer. He had, indeed, very early in life acquired that mastery of style—that pure, pithy, racy, and delightful diction—which

he never lost, and which makes him still one of the great exemplars of modern English prose. He had, likewise, before 1765, written many of his best productions;—essays on politics, commerce, education, science, religion, and the conduct of life; multitudes of wise and witty scraps of literature for his newspaper, his almanacs, and his friends; anecdotes, apologues, maxims; above all, many of those incomparable letters for his private correspondents, to the reading of which, since then, the whole world has been admitted, greatly to its advantage in wisdom and in happiness. Nevertheless, all his writings had been composed for some immediate purpose, and if printed at all, had been first printed separately, and as a general thing without the author’s name. In 1751, however, a partial collection of his writings was published in London without his knowledge,—the book consisting of the papers on electricity sent by him to his friend, Peter Collinson. But these papers, valuable and even celebrated as they were as contributions to science, could give to the public no idea of the various and the marvellous powers of Franklin as a contributor to literature.

     At the close of our colonial epoch, Benjamin Franklin, then fifty-nine years of age, was the most illustrious of Americans, and one of the most illustrious of men; and his renown rested on permanent and benign achievements of the intellect. He was, at that time, on the verge of old age; his splendid career as a scientific discoverer and as a citizen seemed rounding to its full; yet there then lay outstretched before him—though he knew it not-still another career of just twenty-five years; in which his political services to his country and to mankind were to bring him more glory than he had gained from all he had done before; and in which he was to write one book-the story of his own life—that is still the most famous production in American literature, that has an imperishable charm for all classes of mankind, that has passed into nearly all the literary languages of the globe, and that is “one of the

half-dozen most widely popular books ever printed.”¹ It will be most profitable for us to defer our minute study of the literary character of this great writer, until, in a subsequent volume of this work, we can view his literary career as a whole.