Wendell : A Literary History of America 809 Burton. ' ' Of the Revolutionary political pamphlets he says that although they " were phrased in the style of the eighteenth century," they " indi- cate in our country a kind of intellectual activity which in England had displayed itself most characteristically a hundred years earlier." And even in the case of writers so late as those of New England in the middle of the nineteenth century he maintains that "their spontaneous aptitude for idealism, their enthusiastic love for abstractions and for absolute truth, they had derived, too, from the Elizabethan Puritans whose traits they had hereditarily preserved. ' ' The reader gets this thesis pretty well dinned into him before finish- ing the book ; " national inexperience " and " Elizabethan spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility " become very familiar sounds in his ears — a little too familiar at last, so that he is set to wondering whether the iteration of a form of words is not being made to do duty for substantial proof; and one reader, at least, arose from his reading with the impres- sion that although there is something in Professor Wendell's theory, and something worth emphasizing, yet that there is not so much in it as its propounder thinks. It over-states the Elizabethan qualities in the settlers of New England, and under-states their grimly Puritanic qualities. It exaggerates the similarity between the Elizabethans and the later Americans. In accounting for what similarity there was, it over-estimates the effect of heredity, and under-estimates the effect which climate, race- mixture, and social, economic, and political conditions may have had in developing spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility in individuals whose ancestors were not conspicuous for those Elizabethan qualities. It ignores the fact that in every generation there have been many Englishmen, particularly poets and men of letters, who were not of the John Bull type, and consequently it minimizes the effect of English literature, upon contemporary American literature. Lastly, the terms employed are necessarily so inexact, and the phenomena handled are so vast and com- plex, that the generalizations arrived at often do not admit of close appli- cation. In discussing the literature of the seventeenth century, for instance, Professor Wendell prudently omits to point out wherein the Bay Psalm Bock and The Day of Doom exemplify Elizabethan spontaneity and ver- satility ; enthusiasm they certainly show, but it is of the sariie grim kind that cut down the maypoles and closed the theatres. In the eighteenth century most of the pure literature, in verse and prose, is tamely imita- tive of Queen Anne models, not of Elizabethan. In his treatment of in- dividual authors of the nineteenth century Professor Wendell is obliged to lay the emphasis upon their indebtedness to English eighteenth-century literature and to the European romanticism and idealism of their own day, although he returns to his theory in the Conclusion. But the worth of the book does not depend wholly upon the truth of its central proposition. In connection with individual authors many re- marks are made that are fresh and penetrating or at least suggestive. Much truth is happily summed up in these words : " Irving, imbued with nineteenth-century romantic temper, wrote in the classical style of the VOL. VI. — 53.
