The United States have produced a race of historians whose works and names may not unfairly be ranked with those of Hume, Macaulay, Hallam, and Froude. Prescott and Irving have been followed by Bancroft, Motley, Parkman, Adams, Kirk, Goodwin, Young, and Ticknor. Sydney Smith, were he now living, would find his question, "Who reads an American book?" speedily answered; for in English drawing-rooms and on English book-stalls "Evangeline" and "The Wayside Inn" are to be found quite as often as "In Memoriam" and "Idyls of the King"; and "Ferdinand and Isabella" and the "Rise of the Dutch Republic," as often as the histories of Macaulay and Froude.
Theological Literature.
Our theologians have kept pace, in the amount and intellectual force of their writings, with those of the older continent. It is not astonishing that, in a nation established by a sect for the purpose of doing God honor, a race of great theological authors should arise. The names of Hopkins and Emmons, of Dwight, Channing, Norton, Theodore Parker, Wayland, Bacon, Park, Bushnell, and many others, will recur, to remind us how active religious philosophy and speculation have been from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the present.
Political and Legal Writers.
In other departments of letters our progress during the century, though less marked, has been very distinct. Webster, Everett, Sumner, Winthrop, and, it may well be added, Lincoln, have made a literary art, as well as a practical career, of politics. American legal writers, like Greenleaf, Kent, Story, and Parsons, are quoted in the English as in the American courts, as authorities worthy of respect and trust. In the domain of searching literary criticism, England has perhaps produced no author since the days of Gifford and Jeffrey superior in learning, acuteness, and grace to Edwin P. Whipple.
Humorists.
Writers of Fiction.
Humorists have been many; in this field we count not only Lowell, Neal, and Holmes, but the younger band, which includes Artemas Ward, Mark Twain, Nasby, Bret Harte, Warner, and Leland. In the department of essays and miscellaneous belles-lettres, the names of George William Curtis, Thoreau, Tuckerman, Higginson, Marsh, and many more, crowd upon the mind. Foremost among writers of fiction may be classed Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and though in this field America can scarcely contest the palm with the mother country, and the great purely national novel has not yet appeared, the fertility of our novelists affords promise that in time great and national romances will come. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stowe, Donald G. Mitchell, T.B. Aldrich, William D. Howells (poet as well as novelist), Henry James, Julian Hawthorne, Stockton, Miss Phelps, E.E. Hale, and others, have delighted thousands by their imaginative works.
American Dictionaries.
To present even a list, indeed, of American writers who may be called noted, would much more than occupy the limits assigned to this chapter. The multitude that crowds upon the memory, even in a cursory glance over our history, is so large that even in mentioning any names at all one runs the risk of some unjust omission. Suffice it to say that no field of letters has remained wholly uncultivated in this country, and that literary invention in the United States, though sometimes at a pause, on the whole advances with their population and civilization. We have philosophers, men of science, poets, critics, essayists, art writers, theologians, fully able to cope with their literary brethren in the old world. Let it be added that America has produced the two dictionaries which are to-day paramount authority in every English school, college, and university; and that in the science of language George P. Marsh and William D. Whitney have carried their studies to depths as profound, and have given the world results as valuable, as have any old-world philologists.