And In No Part Of Its National
Career Have The United States Been So Successful As In This.
I need
hardly explain that I should commit a monstrous injustice were I to
make a comparison in this matter between England and America.
Literature is the child of leisure and wealth.
It is the produce of
minds which by a happy combination of circumstances have been
enabled to dispense with the ordinary cares of the world. It can
hardly be expected to come from a young country, or from a new and
still struggling people. Looking around at our own magnificent
colonies, I hardly remember a considerable name which they have
produced, except that of my excellent old friend Sam Slick.
Nothing, therefore, I think, shows the settled greatness of the
people of the States more significantly than their firm
establishment of a national literature. This literature runs over
all subjects: American authors have excelled in poetry, in science,
in history, in metaphysics, in law, in theology, and in fiction.
They have attempted all, and failed in none. What Englishman has
devoted a room to books, and devoted no portion of that room to the
productions of America?
But I must say a word of literature in which I shall not speak of it
in its ordinary sense, and shall yet speak of it in that sense which
of all, perhaps, in the present day should be considered the most
ordinary; I mean the every-day periodical literature of the press.
Most of those who can read, it is to be hoped, read books; but all
who can read do read newspapers.
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