William Hickling Prescott

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS PRESCOTT

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
BY HARRY THURSTON PECK New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1905 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1905, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. ——— Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1905. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To WILLIAM ARCHIBALD DUNNING AMICITIÆ CAUSA
For the purely biographical portion of this book an especial acknowledgment of obligation is due to the valuable collection of Prescott's letters and memoranda made by his friend George Ticknor, and published in 1864 as part of Ticknor's Life of W. H. Prescott . All other available sources, however, have been explored, and are specifically mentioned either in the text or in the footnotes.
H. T. P.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, March 1, 1905.

THROUGHOUT the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the United States, though forming a political entity, were in everything but name divided into three separate nations, each one of which was quite unlike the other two. This difference sprang partly from the character of the population in each, partly from divergent tendencies in American colonial development, and partly from conditions which were the result of both these causes. The culture-history, therefore, of each of the three sections exhibits, naturally enough, a distinct and definite phase of intellectual activity, which is reflected very clearly in the records of American literature.
In the Southern States, just as in the Southern colonies out of which they grew, the population was homogeneous and of English stock. Almost the sole occupation of the people was agriculture, while the tone of society was markedly aristocratic, as was to be expected from a community dominated by great landowners who were also the masters of many slaves. These landowners, living on their estates rather than in towns and cities, caring nothing for commerce or for manufactures, separated from one another by great distances, and cherishing the intensely conservative traditions of that England which saw the last of the reigning Stuarts, were inevitably destined to intellectual stagnation. The management of their plantations, the pleasures of the chase, and the exercise of a splendid though half-barbaric hospitality, satisfied the ideals which they had inherited from their Tory ancestors. Horses and hounds, a full-blooded conviviality, and the exercise of a semi-feudal power, occupied their minds and sufficiently diverted them. Such an atmosphere was distinctly unfavourable to the development of a love of letters and of learning. The Southern gentleman regarded the general diffusion of education as a menace to his class; while for himself he thought it more or less unnecessary. He gained a practical knowledge of affairs by virtue of his position. As for culture, he had upon the shelves of his library, where also were displayed his weapons and the trophies of the chase, a few hundred volumes of the standard essayists, poets, and dramatists of a century before. If he seldom read them and never added to them, they at least implied a recognition of polite learning and such a degree of literary taste as befitted a Virginian or Carolinian gentleman. But, practically, English literature had for him come to an end with Addison and Steele and Pope and their contemporaries. The South stood still in the domain of letters and education. Not that there were lacking men who cherished the ambition to make for themselves a name in literature. There were many such, among whom Gayarré, Beverly, and Byrd deserve an honourable remembrance; but their surroundings were unfavourable, and denied to them that intelligent appreciation which inspires the man of letters to press on to fresh achievement. An interesting example is found in the abortive history of Virginia undertaken by Dr. William Stith, who was President of William and Mary College, and who possessed not only scholarship but the gift of literary expression. The work which he began, however, was left unfinished, because of an utter lack of interest on the part of the public for whom it had been undertaken. Dr. Stith's own quaint comment throws a light upon contemporary conditions. He had laboured diligently in collecting documents which represented original sources of information; yet, when he came to publish the first and only volume of his history, he omitted many of them, giving as his reason:—