of his estate and a library of three hundred volumes. By the middle of the century public instruction was compulsory in most of the colonies. A translation of the Bible into the Algonkin tongue, made by John Eliot, the "apostle to the Indians," was published in 1661-1663, the first Bible printed in British America. Just when the quaint little New England Primer began its long career of usefulness is not known; there is a notice of a second impression of it in an almanac of 1691.* In 1704 the Boston News-Letter marked the advent of American journalism, the power which has grown to such gigantic proportions. Such were a few of the significant events during the first century of literary industry in America, an industry that for full another century was to continue producing books which in Charles Lamb's sense, are no books, literature that is not literature. Our review of this product may not be extended or searching; the books themselves are for the most part not easily accessible, sufficient proof that they are not live books. The entire portion of the colonial literary product that either aimed at or in any measure deserved permanence falls into a simple classification under three heads-history, poetry, and theology. HISTORY The history comprises all the prose of a narrative or descriptive nature. It was but natural that some of the colonists should write down a record of their Captain 1579-1632. John Smith, doings from day to day, in the form either of diaries or of reports to the promoters of the coloSometimes these records became nies in the mother country. *Extract from “An Alphabet of Lessons for Youth": "HOLINESS becomes God's house for "KEEP thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. "LIARS shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone." more ambitious and took on the organized form and proportions of a professed history. Captain John Smith, the leading spirit of the Jamestown colony, whose affections seem to have been evenly divided between his sword and his pen, has the honor of inscribing his plain name first on the roll of the English writers of this new land. In 1608 he sent back to England his True Relation of occurrences in Virginia, and sixteen years later, while he was living in England, he published his General History of Virginia, a more comprehensive account of those matters relating to the New World with which he was familiar. It must be remembered, however, that Smith was in no rightful sense an American, but an Englishman, a fair type of the courtly, worldly royalists who came to be known a little later in English history and in Virginian colonization as "cavaliers." He had travelled eastward as well as westward, and he wrote much that had nothing to do with America. He spent less than three years, all told, in this country. His name and his works belong to England, where, of course, their little lustre was even in his own day quite eclipsed. Yet we are not ashamed to lay part claim to those two works, the first literary fruits of the inspiration of the wilderness. They may not be accurate as history, but they are a voice out of momentous days and deeds. For Smith put into his work no slight measure of the heroic, the Homeric quality, which gives vitality to work in any age. Even when he was not true to facts he could not help being true to himself, and he unconsciously portrays himself with all his virtues and vices, his energy, his bluntness, his bravado, and his egotism. There is no reason, however, to suppose, as has often been charged, that he was deliberately untruthful. The pretty story of Pocahontas, for example, was for awhile discredited. But there is more reason to believe the story than to doubt it. We must simply remember the romantic spirit of the man and read him by that light. When we hear his tales of the gigantic Susquehannocks whose language "sounded from them as a voice in a vault" and whose calves were "three-quarters of a yard about," we recognize the writer for a man of imagination and a worthy member of the literary guild. He was bound to magnify a little his deeds, and through them the deeds of his patrons, the "most noble Lords and worthy Gentlemen" of King James's court; and though he chose to call his book a history and not a romance, he was not the man to hang upon any subtle distinction between the words history and story. He tells his story as an "honest Souldier" should, with due regard to the entertainment of his readers. He can be practical, too, as well as romantic. He studies the winds and the clouds in their relation to seasons and harvests. He counts the ears on a stalk of corn and the grains on an ear. He describes in one place, with minutest detail, the methods of cooking maize, but protests that burnt and powdered corn-cob "never tasted well in bread nor broth." On this last point, indeed, none will question his veracity. Of other writers in the South, both in Smith's time and later, honest chroniclers enough, the names belong to history William and not to literature. An exception might be made in the case of one William Strachey, who in his passage to Virginia in the fleet of Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates was wrecked on the Bermuda Islands. His True Reportory of the Wrack, probably written in Virginia in 1610 and published in England in 1612, is a really graphic and imaginative account, and criticism has almost certainly determined that from it, or from Strachey himself, Shakespeare drew some of the pictures and phrases used in the description of Prospero's island in The Tempest. So slender is the link which connects American letters with the highest of England's names. But the South, always conservative and always careless about education, has never been prolific of writers, and with this short notice of John Smith and William Strachey we take a long leave of that region. Samuel Sewall, 1652-1730. The historical writers of colonial New England, from Governor William Bradford in the seventeenth century to Thomas Prince in the eighteenth, were likewise of the plodding, sedate chronicler type. One rather more than the rest, however, writing with the humblest intentions, succeeded in touching to a little life the record of his times. This was Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, of Massachusetts, the publication of whose diary only a few years since has given him a new interest in our eyes. He is memorable for several things. He was a judge in the witchcraft trials of 1692, passing sentence for which he afterward made a public confession of repentance. He published perhaps the first American tract against slavery. And of one of his prophecies Whittier has made a touching poem, praying that "Green forever the memory be Of the Judge of the old Theocracy." But it is the diary, faithfully kept through a long lifetime, that forces itself most upon our attention, and while we can not take a profound interest in its minute, gossipy, and unimaginative record-in the fact that the Judge periodically had his hair cut, or that his pussy-cat died in her thirteenth year—the book makes yet its appeal to our human sympathies and will be read by many who could not be persuaded to look into the more scholarly works of Bradford and Prince. POETRY Poetry in early New England throve even less than narrative and descriptive prose. Indeed, to call any of the verse of that time poetry, argues a lack of humor. The Bay Psalm Book, for instance, was a 'Bay Psalm Book." heroic attempt, conspired in by three worthy divines, to set the Psalms to metre and, by great good fortune, rhyme. The verses were intended to be sung to the five or ten tunes which the churches possessed. Here is one of the more successful stanzas: "Yee gates lift-up your heads and doors everlasting, doe yee lift-up: & there into shall come the glorious-King." Few will succeed in reading even this stanza smoothly at the first attempt. Such utter uncouthness of form, as far removed from Miltonic harmonies as "from the centre thrice to the utmost pole," shows how small a part even the mere reading of poetry can have played in the culture of the New World Puritans. Anne Nevertheless, the Puritans raised up poets according to their tastes and abilities. The poems of one of these, Mistress Anne Bradstreet, were introduced to the British and American public of 1650 under this alluring title, devised doubtless by her London printer: Wigglesworth. The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America; or, Several Poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight. Whatever delight may lie concealed in the rather voluminous verses, -The Four Monarchies, The Four Elements, Contemplations (published later), and other such physical and metaphysical speculations, is not worth seeking for to-day. Some genuine terror, however, may still be extracted from the verses of one of Mrs. Bradstreet's contemporaries, Michael Wigglesworth, who in his Day of Doom (1662) set to a lilting, double-rhymed, Yankee Doodle sort of measure his conception of a Calvinistic Judgment, infant damnation and all. The following is a fair example of the product of the Reverend Mr. Wigglesworth's poetic frenzy: |