Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/818

 8o8 Reviews of Books I., dealing with the seventeenth century, the literature of all but the New England colonies is dismissed with a word, and of the New England writers only Wigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, and Cotton Mather receive specific treatment. In Book II., the only eighteenth-century authors who get more than passing mention are Edwards, Franklin, Dwight (whose longest poem, "The Conquest of Canaan," is not named), Trumbull, Barlow and Freneau. In the remaining four books, which fill nearly four hundred pages, although the principal writers of the nineteenth century are each discussed at some length, the biographical details are meagre and the writings are not examined or even named with any attempt at system or completeness. A rather capricious list of "Authorities and Refer- ences" does something to make up for the lack elsewhere of bibliograph- ical detail. A complete history of American literature then, the book is not. It cannot be used as such ; it should not be judged as such. Professor Wen- dell would probably say that he had no occasion to do again what has already been done by others, and indeed he seems to have made no special study of our colonial and Revolutionary literature or of the minor writers of the republic. What he has given us, instead, is a series of vivacious though rather sketchy essays upon the broad facts and tendencies of American literature, with special reference to the relation of that litera- ture to English life and literature. The essays find their unity and nov- elty in a thesis which is maintained throughout the book, to-wit, that by reason of our " national inexperience," or the absence of " the struggling complexity of social and political forces in densely populated regions," Americans preser-ed for two centuries and more a good deal of the "spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility " of their Elizabethan ancestors while Englishmen during the same period were rapidly developing new types of national character. In this way Professor Wendell accounts for the fact that, in spite of fundamental unity of blood, language, law, and moral ideals, the two great divisions of the English-speaking race have become so distinct and at times have been so estranged. The Revolution, for instance, "sprang from a deep temperamental misunderstanding be- tween the native English and their American compatriots;" "while under the influence of European conditions the English temperament had steadily altered from that of spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile Eliza- bethans to that of stubborn, robust John Bull, the original American temper, born under Elizabeth herself, had never deeply changed. ' ' But our author does not forget that his chief business is with the literature. His constant method, therefore, is to sketch the salient features of English history and character in the century then under consideration, show that English literature of the period reflected the national temper, sketch Amer- ican history and character in the same period, and then show that the differ- ences (in kind, not in merit) between the two literatures were due to the persistence in America of an earlier type of Englishman. Thus he says of Cotton Mather's Magnalia that " it groups itself not with such work as Dryden's, but rather with such earlier work as that of Fuller or even of