ARTICLE III.

COMPARISON OF AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH
ENGLISH.

THAT Americans should seek to preserve the purity of the English language, is a remark which admits no question. It is enough that the language, with all the conceptions which it has embodied, is our own, and that it will inevitably go down to future ages. We must grant, however, that it has never been in America precisely what it is in the land of its birth. To detect the peculiar forms which it has assumed in America, compared with those which it has presented in England, may not be useless as respects the improvement of our own; nor can I think an attempt to lay them open will be deemed trivial by any who have reflected on the importance of language, not only as the expression of thought, but as a powerful instrument in the progress of thought.

Such a comparison necessarily carries us back to the state of our language when the first English colonies were established on this continent. None need to be reminded, that it was quite different from what it now is; that it had in fact phrases and constructions so foreign from those to which we are now accustomed, that when we begin to read the writings of the seventeenth century, the process is not unlike the learning of a new language. At no period, perhaps, has American literature diverged further from contemporary English, than the English of our own age from that which prevailed during the times of Charles and of the Commonwealth. Probably, however, a greater contrast existed formerly than now between conversation and writing. It is certain, there were writers of two hundred years ago, who came more nearly than their distinguished contemporaries to what is now deemed idiomatic and colloquial. We meet sometimes with the plain, downright English, deriving itself almost wholly from the tribes who one after another lived in Britain and moulded its speech. Oftener we recognize a magnificent and stately Anglicism inviting large infusions of ancient idioms and constructions, accumulating image upon image, and multiplying words until a period should become almost intermin

able. The former of these styles we may compare to a plain web without richness or show of anything old or gaudy; the latter, to a splendid embroidery, the cloth, it is true, woven of Saxon warp and woof, but with greatest diligence of learning and labor inwrought with golden threads selected. and taken out of the splendid relics which antiquity left in the works of her mighty genius. This distinction was of long standing. Every one knows how much the Latinized idiom prevailed for ages, forming far back the style of Bacon and of Hooker, characterizing equally Milton, the champion of the people, and Taylor, the ornament of the nobles, and descending even to Barrow. It has been less understood until recently, that in the mean time there was another style, we might almost call it another dialect. Some distinguished authorities as Southey, the Edinburgh Review, and our own. North American, have of late called attention to Bunyan as an example. The age which produced the magnificence of Milton and the exuberant imagery of Taylor, gave birth also to the simple way of speaking which characterized this unlettered but inventive genius. The idiom which he used, and of which the age furnished some other examples-Baxter, I think, may be named as preeminent-seems to have existed long before, flowing in a sort of under-current beneath immense masses of ancient erudition, and taking its rise in fountains as hidden as those of the Nile. From what has now been said, it appears how preposterous is the notion that it originated in the writings of Addison. Scarcely less erroneous is the opinion which traces it a step further towards its source, and ascribes it to Tillotson. As to Addison, he polished and adorned, by beautiful imagery and graceful constructions, the uncouth language by which his predecessor disfigured and enervated his admirably good sense. Nor has Tillotson any higher claim than Addison to originality. He found in the prose of Cowley and Dryden as much simplicity as he employed, and more vivacity. The Essays of Cowley are in fact as simple and graceful as his Pindarics are ungainly, affected, and absurd. He wrote indeed with as much ease and liveliness as Bunyan, though his style was not less different than his character and pursuits. The simplicity of the one, is the unstudied elegance of the scholar; that of the other, the plainness of the fervid and unlettered preacher. Both, in one word, made an easy use of the common dialect; here the agreement ceases. This dialect they found; their

age had nothing to do with making it. It was then true that it came from the olden times. Hume detects it as far back as the reign of the eighth Henry. The Spectator has made one of the examples which Hume adduces from that period, quite familiar to its readers, the letter of Anne Boleyn to the king; a composition "differing," as the historian affirms, "little or nothing from the language of our time." We are assured by the same authority, that the language used in the courts of Elizabeth and James, was very similar to that of cultivated society in his own age. We know well that the poesy of Shakspeare is never so delightful, so like the mellowest strains of music, as when free from foreign infusions, it oozes forth in the sweet strains of the ancient and undefiled English.

My design is not, however, to examine the origin of these opposite classes of style, thus dividing the literature of England as widely, though by no means in the same way, as the dialects of the Grecian tribes. I wish merely to point out the nature of the division as affecting the age which transferred the language to a new soil. That age saw the division in its full extent; the deeply read in ancient learning on the one side, seeming to have forged all their sentences out of ore and with instruments, one might think, not younger much than Vulcan himself; and, on the other side, the less learned marking on their unpolished pages the characters of thought and language which the common people were wont to use. Yet among the latter were those, who to some extent combined, as we might presume, something of the peculiarities of both. They had not the learning of Milton or Taylor; nor were they rude and untaught like Bunyan. scholars, they advanced beyond the large majority of their contemporaries, but not so far as to leave pedantry wholly behind. Among these were the ministers and civilians who gave their character to the early habits of New-England. They were scholars, but not of the highest order; they were endowed with strong powers, not with the inspirations of genius. Their learning was of a peculiar cast; massive, to be sure, but without grace or symmetry. Gathered, to some degree, from the original Scriptures, and from the ancient classics, it imbibed too little of their spirit; and was rather redolent of the schools, and the middle ages. It owed little, if anything, to the genius of poetry or of eloquence. Literature was in fact, if the truth must be told, scarcely more

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than scholastic theology embodied in forms of harsh and quaint expression. The climax of this quaint theological literature, if we may so term it, was reached in that excellent man and unwearied punster, the renowned Cotton Mather, who hath left in his Magnalia great things, it is true, in biography and history, but still greater, it seemeth to me, in quibbles and quirks; greater, it may not untruly be deemed, than he of later days, whom tradition maketh known to us for the same edifying gift, Mather Byles.

Here, then, I conceive, we are to begin in distinguishing the peculiarities of our literature; our fathers brought with them a singular form of the native language. Theirs was not the English of eloquence, of poetry, nor yet of conversation. It was the English of scholastic theology. Removed from intercourse with their countrymen, employed in severe labors, surrounded by difficulties and dangers, and withdrawn from libraries and ancient institutions of learning, they could not be expected to polish and elevate their unformed speech, or even to receive at once the improvements which were going forward in Britain. Their idiom, quaint as it was, would serve all purposes of palpable necessity, and they had neither leisure nor taste for a change. It was not so in England. England was in a state of comparative leisure and security. Hume has undertaken to prove that free institutions are essential to the literary eminence of a nation. The argument is simple:-Personal security is the first object of consideration with men; wherever this is not made sure by the government, it will absorb individual attention; wherever, on the contrary, this is extended to each citizen without effort of his own, the mind will be free to follow its own choice of employment. A due proportion of talent will, in the latter case, receive a direction to science and literature; a result which, in the former case, it would be preposterous to expect. The principle is doubtless sound and well established. Still it is often not so much the form of government, as other circumstances, which determine the amount of personal security. England, amidst the vicissitudes of its government, and under the despotic rule even of the Stuarts, offered far greater security to life and property than the freer States of Virginia and Massachusetts, surrounded and borne down, as these latter were, by difficulties and dangers-enduring poverty at home, assailed by enemies from abroad. The consequence was what might have been foreseen. Lan

guage retained in the one country, and even increased the progressive impulse which it had before acquired, while in the other its course was obstructed. At the best, it was stationary. Thus, while from the force of circumstances American literature continued without improvement, England was polishing its heavy and cumbrous forms of speech into the lighter and more graceful idiom, which it has ever since. retained, and which most love best, however many would. disparage it by the contrast with that which it supplanted. America meantime did nobly, but could not do everything. Our schools and higher institutions, monuments as they will be forever of the sound judgment and practical wisdom of their founders, served but to retain learning from decay; they could merely keep it where it was; it was hardly possible that they should impart to it new force or new refinement. They saved, but they could not ripen, its fruits. They protected the sacred flame amidst the rage of conflicting elements; it was reserved for a more tranquil age to kindle a brighter and more glorious lustre. It was about a hundred years from the settlement of Plymouth when the home of the Pilgrims was made illustrious by the refined literature of Pope and of Addison. During that long period, how was the genius of the west employed? In honorable occupations, we grant; in self-protection, in founding civil, literary, and ecclesiastical institutions for coming ages, not to say, in the very needful, though humbler business of getting a hard living. Literature, however, could not flourish. The very age, which presented (if we may repeat the beautiful allegory borrowed by Melmoth from Plato) the Graces, finding their indestructible temple in the soul of Addison, exhibited also the awkward and uncouth gambols which a Mather could play, with the same noble forms of language, reminding us less of the fabled deities knit in perpetual dance, than of the limping Vulcan when once he bore nectar to the gods amidst the laughter of Olympus.

I have dwelt the longer on this period in our parallel, because the circumstances which characterized it were, as I think, among the chief which severed American literature from English. A dialect of the language had been transferred to the new continent. Here it became not a dialect, but the common language of books. It continued without

essential improvement for a century or more, while its original form was advancing rapidly to perfection. Let us now