matter of fact, from the time of the Stamp Act, political essays of every description filled the newspapers, and what one paper published was soon reprinted in others. Thus the influence of the press in this critical period can hardly be overrated. If the "pumpkin Gentry" of New England (to use a tory phrase) took offence at some encroachment, gentlemen planters of the South were sure to read the whole case in a few weeks and, in spite of their differing civilization, to sympathize with the Northern firebrands. When Dr. Arthur Lee sent home to The Virginia Gazette his Monitor, a series of essays describing hostile conditions in London, and urging his countrymen to non-importation, it was not by any means his countrymen of Virginia alone who heard the call. The Monitor has something of the distinguished style of the Farmer, and it is natural that the two should have been published together in a Williamsburg edition. Revolutionary Virginia burgesses always toasted the Farmer's and Monitor's letters together. But essays of an entirely different type also appeared constantly. Republicans and Loyalists fought violent battles under assumed classical names. Constitutionalis, Massachusettensis, Senex, Novanglus, Pacificus, Caesariensis, Amicus Publico, Cunctator, Virginius, Mucius Scaevola, Cato, Scipio, Leonidas, Brutus, and many more argued hotly and often powerfully the whole question of allegiance, on abstract grounds.

Isaiah Thomas's Massachusetts Spy shows the course of this long battle. Constantly on the verge of being suppressed, from its establishment in 1770 to the Revolution, it carried radicalism to its logical conclusion. When the Spy began to be reprinted in other papers, as "the most daring production ever published in America," the country as a whole was ready for Tom Paine's Common Sense.

In regard to other forms of periodical literature before the Revolution, it is often difficult to draw precise distinctions.1 Newspapers are easily enough distinguished in general by the attempt to give items of current news. Outside the regular news sheets, there is a strange assortment of colonial productions usually classed as magazines, but in many cases hardly

'Mr. Albert Matthews notes this difficulty in his bibliography of New England magazines. See his Lists of New England Magazines, in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. XIII, pp. 69–74.

recognizable as such. For instance, William Livingston's Independent Reflector, or Weekly Essays and also Andrew Oliver's Censor, are nothing more than single essays published serially. The Censor was published in weekly reply to "Mucius Scaevola" and other writers of the Spy. The very meaning of the word “magazine” in the eighteenth century makes classification difficult. It was literally a "storehouse," being applied to literature as a "collection"; almost any assemblage of writings, especially if published serially, could be referred to as a 'magazine." Even the regular London magazines of the period were made up largely of excerpts from weekly reviews and periodicals, along with a summary of the news of the month. A department called "Poetical Essays" was usually more original, but on the whole both The Gentleman's Magazine and The London Magazine could be described fairly enough as collections of material from various sources.

There were a few magazines of this standard English type in America before the Revolution. Franklin, as usual, led the way, though it happened that his rival Andrew Bradford actually published the first magazine in the colonies. Franklin's soon followed, and these two little periodicals brought out the same month in Philadelphia, 1741, clearly indicate the attempt to transplant the English type, with some adaptations, for colonial readers. Franklin's title, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America, shows his intention of giving a review of colonial news rather than of British. He did, as a matter of fact, use The Virginia Gazette and other weeklies for articles and verse, but he also took European items whenever he could get them. Both magazines were evidently premature, however, for Bradford's existed only three months, and Franklin's only six.

The next attempt at this sort of periodical came from Boston two years later. Jeremy Gridley was the able editor of The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle. It is an excellent piece of work for that date, both in general arrangement and in details of printing. There is very little original material, however, since the editor not only imitated The London Magazine very closely in plan, but boldly copied most of the essays, articles, and verse from it or from The Gentleman's Magazine. An occasional translation from the classics by a Harvard

student, a burlesque by "Jonathan Weatherwise" on the absurd weather signs of the country folk, or perhaps a timely article from a "neighbouring colony" does not suffice to impart a native flavour to the magazine as a whole. It is distinctly "imported. The attempt was nevertheless creditable, and certainly kept readers in touch with the best English reviews. The magazine continued for three years.

A dozen years later The New England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure announced its motto, "Alluring Profit with Delight we blend," but it confined itself to hackneyed essays on old models. In the same year, however, at Philadelphia, a magazine of decided originality and of genuine importance in colonial literature was coming out month by month with the first provost of the new college as its editor and guiding spirit. The Rev. William Smith, called to America from Aberdeen in 1752, brought a great love of letters to his new work and soon succeeded in imparting his own literary enthusiasms to a group of young students. It is largely due to his constant encouragement that a strain of lyric poetry at length sounded in clear, welcome notes, a strain all too short and slight, but of real beauty. These young poets belonged to the generation after that of Franklin's famous Junto, one of the college group being a son of Franklin's friend Thomas Godfrey, the mathematician. Thomas Godfrey, Jr., needed all the active help of the provost, since poetical gifts did not meet with favour in the Godfrey household. Francis Hopkinson, Joseph Shippen, and Nathaniel Evans were also introduced to the public by Smith.

He

The interesting thing about William Smith's own literary enthusiasms is his love of eighteenth-century romanticism. In a thoroughly romantic temper he made himself a retreat by the falls of the Schuylkill, which he describes under the guise of Theodore, the Hermit, in his American Magazine, noting "the singular gloom of its situation," hidden by "a romantic tuft of trees," and made more lonely by surrounding waters. could soon announce in his magazine that he had almost too many poems to draw from. Practically all the verse in its thirteen numbers is original, although at times, especially in the long poems of James Sterling, the most conventional eighteenthcentury manner is amusingly evident. The essays, with very few exceptions, were not only written in the colonies but were

often well adapted to the problems of the day, the war on the border, the Indians, the public policies of the government. The pride in "this young country" is everywhere evident, combined with perfect loyalty to Great Britain. In this year 1758 the successor of The American Magazine, called The New American Magazine, continued the same general policy, without securing the same originality. William Smith had been called to England, and the new venture lacked his power. It had the honour of publishing Nathaniel Evans's fine Ode on the late General Wolfe, however, in probably its earliest and simplest form.

With the next magazines we are again on the eve of the revolution. "The town has met," and we read instructions, articles, orations, odes, and satires on the situation, sometimes reprinted from the newspapers, sometimes written for the magazine, but always inflammatory, since the two noteworthy periodicals of this period, The Pennsylvania Magazine and The Royal American Magazine, were edited respectively by the two firebrands, Thomas Paine and Isaiah Thomas. Paine's magazine did not lack pungent wit of one kind or another, although for the more strictly literary sections both he and Isaiah Thomas drew freely on conventional English sources which, in theory, they should have rejected. Thomas's Royal American Magazine is enlivened by the famous Paul Revere engravings and is otherwise interesting, particularly for its confident belief in the new country soon to be the United States.

CHAPTER VIII

American Political Writing, 1760-1789

A

MERICAN history between 1760 and 1789—from the

end, that is, so far as military operations were concerned, of the Seven Years' War to the inauguration of the new government under the Federal Constitution-falls naturally into three well-marked periods. The first, comprising the development of the constitutional struggle with Great Britain over taxation and imperial control, reaches its culmination in the armed collision between the British and the patriot forces at Lexington, 19 April, 1775. The second period covers the eight years of war, ending with the peace treaty of September, 1783; while the third embraces the so-called "critical period" of the Confederation, and the formation and adoption of the Constitution.

Such a time of storm and stress, of revolution and evolution, is pretty certain, especially in a new country, if it bring forth literature at all, to bring forth such as is predominantly political in content, style, and purpose. The Revolutionary leaders who have left a large and permanent impress upon American literature were concerned chiefly with such weighty matters as the nature of the British constitution, the formulation of colonial rights, and the elaboration of schemes of government and administration; and it was of these things that they chiefly wrote. It is a striking tribute to the classical education of the age, to the moulding power of closely-reasoned theological and legal treatises on which ministers and lawyers fed,' and to the subtle, pervasive influence of the English Bible, that the best political writing of the Revolutionary period attained a dignity and

See Book I, Chap. VII, for evidence as to the knowledge of French radical books in the colonies after 1760.