PERIODS OF LITERATURE.

CHAPTER II.

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THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

WE may trace the influence of the controlling facts or tendencies to which we have referred, through the three great periods under which American history obviously falls:

I. The Colonial, or Period of Settlement..

II. The Revolutionary, or Period of Struggle for Independence.

III. The first three quarters of the Nineteenth century.

I. The voices of the first period are, to the modern English reader, few, faint, and far. It was a time of great and fruitful activity. The constitutions of the early states were being tentatively laid down, and social rules of life, destined to influence their descendants, were being formulated by the settlers; but literature, outside the range of a primitive politics and a severe theology, was only beginning, under unfavourable conditions, to exist. The prose and rude verse of the Colonial days are, with some exceptions, the stammering speech of an energetic, industrial people, whose hands are in constant conflict with barren deserts, wild beasts, or rude tribes; whose hearts are aflame with fervour; but whose heads are bewildered by superstitions, as natural to their circumstances as to their age. That age was, in some respects, fortunate in having no professional authors; for the absence of literary ambitions, with their attendant jealousies, left the pioneers

of civilisation more free to devote themselves to their besetting tasks, to accomplish which, and not to secure either present praise or future fame, they gave alike their sinews and their brains. Professor Coit Tyler's recent book on this Era of the Dawn is so judicious, fair, and full (its sole grave defect being a sometimes diffusive iteration of exaggerated praise), that most readers, whose life is limited, will accept it as their authority for the matter and manner of the half-forgotten folios it has rescued from oblivion. This author roughly divides our first period into two sections:-that from 1607 (the date of the settlement of Virginia) to 1676, when the close of King Philip's war established the power of the settlers to hold their ground against the native tribes; and that from 1676 to 1765, the date of the passing of the Stamp Act. During the former interval, he notes that the civilisation of the New World was due to immigrants bred in England; during the latter it was mainly "in the hands of Americans born in America." Two features are common to both: the scant literature of the time was developed in diverse groups of states, having with each other only distant and casual relationships; it had no national character: moreover, the civilisation was almost wholly transplanted from England. The congeries of races, which it is the great problem of the Federation to harmonise, had not begun to gather. The Latin elements-Spanish and French-of Florida and Louisiana had not yet been introduced; nor the Celtic, nor the German, save in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, which, passing perforce into our hands in 1664, became New York.

There is, in the writings of the early time, no trace of the cosmopolitan spirit which has only during the last few decades begun to take shape; nor do they, in any considerable degree, reflect the differences of rank. Of the two original "distributing centres" of our race, the northern was

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almost wholly peopled by well-to-do representatives of the middle class; the "Old Dominion" of Virginia, the foundation of which partially realised the dreams of Raleigh, was originally settled by more motley crews, consisting, on the one hand, of adventurous gentlemen like himself; on the other, by an attendant throng of dissolute retainers, who left their country for their country's good. Two centuries later the heirs of the one set were the great statesmen and planters, of the other the "mean whites" of the South.

As Virginia was the parent of Anglo-American life, so it was the parent of Anglo-American literature. But this colony, founded at the time of the meridian blaze of English imagination, when Shakespeare was, in his greatest plays, holding up the mirror to our grandest life, has in its written records little trace of the richness and grasp of our passionate Elizabethan thought. The first impulse of an emigrant is not to write dramas, but to send home a letter to his friends. Like the Spaniards of a still earlier age, who in the track of Cortez and Pizarro had been lured from their native land by the thirst of conquest, discovery, or gain, these Virginian Englishmen, in the pauses between the stress of fortification and crude legislature, were content with more or less connected notes of their new experiences of nature and of men, of sea and land, of battle and of tillage. The most remarkable of these is the account of the first considerable Western settlement by its first Governor, Captain John Smith. The life of this remarkable man, traveller and fighter over half the world then known, is one of the most vivid of romances: from his single-handed encounter with the three Turks, whose heads he cut off, in the East, to the rash exploration when he was saved from an Indian club by the child Pocahontas, it reads more like a canto of The Cid or a chapter of Westward Ho! than a page of real biography. His True

Relation of Virginia is characterised by the graphic, often quaint, vigour of a style like that of Defoe, and by the sound sense, dominating will, and administrative power which it displays. This narrative, published in London (1608), has been recognised as the earliest book in American literature. Smith, who died in 1631, after, in other volumes, detailing his adventures, may be regarded as the last pure scion of the race of our Norse sea-kings. Two years subsequent to the date of Smith's True Relation there appeared (1610) William Strachey's account of The Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, by his commander on the outward voyage, "upon and from the islands of the Bermudas," which, resplendent with passages of descriptive power, is believed to have supplied the groundwork of "The Tempest." Classical scholarship was, in the same district, represented by George Sandys, who, exhorted thereto by his friend Michael Drayton, completed on the banks of the James river (1626) a highly creditable, because frequently imaginative though sometimes rough, translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. About the same time the Welsh Puritan, Vaughan, sent home from Newfoundland his Golden Fleece. In 1633 Maryland was detached from Virginia for the benefit of King Charles' favourite, Lord Baltimore; and nearly a generation afterwards the two sister States, as "Leah and Rachel" were extolled in John Hammond's vigorous apology. At an earlier date Governor Smith had felt called on to defend the country of his adoption against injurious rumours, the effect of which in retarding emigration he quaintly clenches-" The company in London became suitors to his Majesty to compel vagabonds and condemned men to go thither. Nay, some did choose to be hanged before they would go thither, and were.” Similarly, Hammond, on a visit to London, expresses his amaze at the ignorance of people in a condition below that of "the meanest servant in Virginia," who would rather cry

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on the streets, or "stuff Newgate and Bridewell, or cleave to Tyburn," than forsake their even then overcrowded lanes for "a place of pleasure and plenty." Two years later the witty Alsop, in lighter strain, celebrated Maryland alone. The invitations of these settlers have, after the lapse of two centuries, had a response beyond their reckoning. Before the Revolution, the States numbered three millions; now their population has reached fifty millions. Eleven years after its settlement, Virginia received an importation destined to poison its lifeblood. In 1819, a Dutch vessel, "rigged with curses dark," sailed up the James river, and landed, on its north bank, twenty negro slaves. The other arrivals of the early timeespecially between 1640-60-were troops of Cavaliers. After the Restoration, it received an infusion of old Cromwellians. -exiles in their turn; but these last neither disturbed the loyalty, nor seriously affected the manners, of the colony.

"The Merry Monarch" has been credited with a clemency largely due to indifferentism: he tolerated Milton and esteemed Marvell; as James V. of Scotland had continued, through life, to cherish regard for his old tutor Sir David Lyndsay. But Charles II., if a poor hater, was a weak lover; and satire said that his succession to power meant "indemnity to his enemies and oblivion to his friends." He wore a robe of Virginian silk at his coronation, passed Navigation Acts tending to ruin the colony, and sent out Sir William Berkeley to misrule it. This incompetent person having exasperated the people, by leaving them unprotected against the Indian raids, they chose a chief for themselves, Nathaniel Bacon, who repelled the savages, but was arraigned as a rebel, and subsequently died with suspicious suddenness. The leading incidents of his struggle with the Governor have been preserved in the Burwell Papers, a fantastic but animated record, with which Mr. Tyler collates a set of anonymous

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