Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/32

 CHAPTER XXY Scholars THERE seem to be three external modes conditioning the production of our scholarly literature. Until the Re- volution, it was produced by scattered individuals. Thereafter literary coteries and learned societies supervened upon individual production, which continued, but with a more definite tone and focus. Finally, with the nineteenth century in its second quarter, the universities supervened upon the other two modes, and were added to them, as stimulus and audience, outlet and patron. Then all three modes continued together, and were compounded. Speaking generally and tentatively, the individualism of the first mode may be called British ; the urbane "/ social tone of the second, French ; the organized institutionalism of the third, German. With the exception of a monstrous accretion like the learn- ing of Cotton Mather, ' a leviathan of the seventeenth-century type, such learning as the eighteenth century could muster in this country was on the one hand rather elegant than professed- ly scholarly, for a gentleman must not be too much of a special- ist; and on the other hand, distinctly didactic, for a cultivated citizen of a new country must endeavour to teach and improve its uncultivated masses. What the eighteenth century offers is a clerical and gentlemanly cultivation of Hebrew and the clas- sics, a missionary concern with the languages of the American Indians, a somewhat schoolmasterly interest in English gram- mar and lexicography, and an elegant trifling with the modern and the Oriental languages. Ezekiel Cheever's Short Intro- duction to the Latin Tongue. . . being Accidence Abridged was published in 1709. A mock-heroic Latin poem, Muscipula: ' See Book I, Chap. in. 444