Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/767

Rh AMERICAN LITERATUEE 723 remarkable triumphs of debate in history. Bon.t of his pleadings on criminal trials have an almost terrible power. But his literary genius and richness of illustration found freer scope in his famous appeal for the Greeks in 1824, his great speech (1820) on the second centennial anni versary of the landing of the Pilgrims, or his address (1825) on laying the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monu ment. Webster s eloquence, everywhere solid, massive, and on great occasions glowing with a lurid light, is not the mere record of half-forgotten strifes; it is &quot;vital in every part,&quot; and belongs to the permanent literature of his country, in whose political arena he Avas during his life perhaps the most powerful actor. The art of making commemorative speeches, technically called &quot; orations,&quot; erett, has been cultivated in North America to excess. The great master in this species of composition was Edward Everett, distinguished by his early association with Lord Byron in Greece, the high dignities governor of Massa chusetts, minister to the court of St James s, and president of Harvard to which he attained, and by the variety of his accomplishments. Mr Everett was for ten years a useful member of Congress. In his literary work he displayed an almost fatal fluency, having contributed to the &quot; North American Review,&quot; of which he was for some time editor, upwards of a hundred articles in the space of a few years. These articles are inevitably of unequal merit, but they everywhere evince the ripe scholarship of a highly cultivated mind. The volume by which he is best remembered twenty-seven Orations published in 1836, is marked by the same characteristics. Discoursing on a wide range of subjects among which the refrains are America and Greece, the &quot; Mayflower,&quot; the Progress of Dis covery, Patriotism, Reform, the Republic, Concord, Lex ington, and the inevitable Bunker Hill these speeches are always able, but seldom inspiring : carefully elaborated and richly adorned, they are the production of the first of rhetoricians rather than a genuine orator. Among the remaining lawyers and statesmen, remarkably nume rous in the States, who have in the course of their professional careers made highly creditable contributions to literature, it may suffice to mention II. Swiuton Legare of Charleston, at one time a student of law at Edinburgh, a prominent speaker in the House of Representatives, afterwards President Tyler s attorney-general, who published in the Southern Quarterly and New York Reviews a series of masterly criticisms mainly relating to Greek and Roman litera ture ; J. P. Kennedy of Baltimore, a successful barrister and Con gressman, also a vigorous essayist and author of some remarkably lively sketches of country life and manners in the Old Dominion ; Richard H. Wilde, of Georgia, in which State, after surmounting unusual difficulties with remarkable perseverance, he rose at the bar to be attorney-general, author of the song entitled the &quot;Lament of the Captive,&quot; and of a Life of Tasso, displaying great research and occasionally subtle criticism, written after two years residence ma. in Europe ; and, taking higher rank as an author, Richard Dana, a barrister of the early years of the century, and adherent in politics of the old Federalist party in the state. Dana became known in the world of letters as the author of a Fourth of July Oration in 1814, and somewhat later as the contributor to the North American JRevicw of appreciative and discriminating criticisms of the English lake poets. In 1827 he published hisfautastic ghost story of the &quot;Buc caneer &quot; and other poems, to which he continued to add at intervals. Many of his minor verses are characterised by remarkable grace, but they want original force. Among contemporary politicians, illips. Mr Wendell Phillips is the only one who can be called a great orator ; the ease and energy of his style at its best being rarely surpassed. But the speeches of Mr Sumner are eloquent, and his arrange ment of facts converging to clench his argument is often masterly. storical 2. HISTORY, as the reflection of philosophy on the states- d Mo- manship and the struggles of the past, seldom comes very iters early. in n ^ tional literature. The 18th century in America supplied, in letters, journals, and contemporary chronicles, material for more elaborate and comprehensive treatment .ucroft. in the 19th at the hands of George Bancroft, a leadinf Democrat, who held the post of representative of his country in Great Britain from 1846 to 1849. His great work three volumes of which are devoted to the Colonisation and seven to the Revolutionary period published at in tervals between 1834 and 1874, has been generally ac cepted as the standard history of the United States up to this time. The book is written for the most part in a sufficiently vigorous style; somewhat defective, however, in elegance, and characterised by a certain monotony and want of ease, which detracts from the pleasure of the reader. Bancroft s statements of matters of fact are generally reliable ; but his comments are moulded even more than is usual by the foregone theories of a political partisan. The rival history of Richard Hildreth, which appeared in Hildretl six volumes, issued in rapid succession (1849-53), while marked by the same Puritan tone, is even more severe in its judgments. The style is more animated, but more prone to the torva voluptas of false rhetoric. The key note of the sentiment which pervades Mr Hildreth s book is to be found in his keen abolitionist views, previously expressed in a juvenile work of the author, The White Slave. One of its merits is its appreciation of the Federalists, and especially of the genius and character of their leader, Hamilton. Of the host of national bio graphies in which the West abounds, Sanderson s Lives of the Signers, the historical sketches of G. C. Verplanck, Wirt s Patrick Henry, and the stupendous series edited and largely written by Jared Sparks, may be signalised. Nearly one-half of the works of the most classic American prose writers of the generations previous to our own are historical or biographical. Washington Irving s Conquest Irving. of Granada, and his lives of Columlus, the Followers of Mahomet, Goldsmith, and Washington, if not the most ori ginal, are among the most interesting of his works accu rate in their leading estimates, and marked by the usual smoothness and even flow of his style. Irving contemplated a continuation of the record of the early relations of Spain to the New World, but, with his wonted generosity, abandoned the theme on hearing that the task had been assumed by worthy hands. The works of William H. Prescott Prescott, the most artistic historian to whom the United States have hitherto given birth, are remarkable from the difficulties under which they were produced, and for the well- deserved success which they have achieved. This success is due in part to the genius and indomitable industry of the writer, in part to the steady concentration of his powers on the arduous undertaking of which he had at an early age -formed a just estimate. In a diaiy of 1819 (that is, in his twenty-third year) he allows ten years for preliminary studies and ten more for the execution of hia task a notable example to his countrymen, nine-tenths of whose literary performances will prove ephemeral, less from lack of ability in the writers than from an utterly inadequate sense of the time and toil that every true Muse demands of her votaries. Ferdinand and Isabella, given to the world in 1838, was written while Mr Prescott was, owing to an accident at college, almost wholly deprived of his sight. His authorities, in a foreign tongue, were read to him by an assistant, and by aid of a writing-case for the blind he scrawled the pages of his great work. It soon attained a European as well as an American fame, and superseded all other records of the period of which it treats. No such comprehensive view of Spain at the zenith of her greatness has ever appeared in English. The proportion of its parts and the justice of its estimates are universally acknow ledged; while hypercriticism of the style graceful, correct, and sufficiently varied can only point to the occasional possibility of greater condensation. Among the most notable of the descriptions, which can seldom be detached from the whole into which they are woven, we may refer to the return of Columbus and the contrasted characters of Queen Isabella and Elizabeth. The Conquest of Mexico,