Page:Americans (1922).djvu/49

 in some metropolitan pulpits to this day. In the second place, German metaphysics and the romantic deluge swept over us quite as devastatingly as over England; and the color and humor and emotion of Scott, Cooper, and then Dickens made the wit and solid sense of our classical period seem flat and unprofitable. Finally, when popular curiosity about our origins is awakened, it is quickly satisfied by a few familiar pictures of the Puritan colonists in the seventeenth century before the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, here or elsewhere.

It is only by some such considerations as these that one can understand the affrontery of recent critics of civilization in the United States who date the emancipation of the American mind from seventeenth century theology with the introduction of Goethe and Kant to New England. And it is only by assuming the existence of wide general ignorance, the picturesque ignorance of legend, with regard to our own eminent men, that one can explain the friendly condescension with which the average journalist, for example, refers to that "simple," or to that "homespun" fellow, "our honest Franklin."

In a respectful and indeed laudatory notice in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1806, Lord Jeffrey employed the case of the "uneducated tradesman of America" to support his contention that "regular education is unfavourable to vigour or originality of understanding." Franklin attained his eminence, so runs the argument, without academical instruc-