Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/312

286 thirteen editions in forty years, but it was still less popular than Mrs. Susannah Haswell Rowson's Charlotte (1794), one of the most popular novels ever published in America. Mrs. Rowson (1762-1824), an American only by immigration, had indeed written the novel in England (1790?), but Charlotte Temple, to call it by its later title, was thoroughly naturalized. It has persuaded an increasingly naïve underworld of fiction readers to buy more than a hundred editions and has built up a legend about the not too authentic tomb of Charlotte Stanley in Trinity Churchyard, New York.

A particular importance of The Coquette and Charlotte Temple was that they gave to fiction something of the saga element by stealing, in the company of facts, upon a community which winced at fiction. And this brief garment of illusion was not confined to New York and New England. In 1792-3-7 Pennsylvania saw the publication, in four volumes, of the first part of the remarkable Modern Chivalry. The author, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), son of a poor Scotch immigrant, graduate of Princeton, tutor and licensed preacher, master of an academy in Maryland, editor of The United States Magazine in Philadelphia (1776), chaplain in the Revolutionary army, author of patriotic tragedies and pamphlets, and lawyer and judge in Pittsburg after 1781, brought to his work a culture and experience which gave his satiric picture of American life many of the features of truth. Farrago, the hero, is a new Don Quixote, his servant Teague a witless and grotesque Sancho Panza, but the chief follies of the book are found not in them but in the public which they encounter and which would gladly make Teague hero and office-holder. No man was a more convinced democrat than Brackenridge, but he was also solid, well-read, and deeply bored by fools who canted about free men and wise majorities. Against such cant and the excesses of political ambition he directed his chief satire, but he let few current fads and affectations go unwhipped. His book had an abundant popularity, especially along the frontier which it satirized. The second part (1804-5), ostensibly the chronicle of a new Western settlement, is almost a comic history of civilization in America. It is so badly constructed, however, and so often goes over ground well trodden in the earlier part as to be generally inferior to it in interest. Here Brackenridge