Here are soldiers, legislators, artisans, a strong, noble race.

sufficient for to-day.

Poets will be born, hereafter.

The first of her Franklin.

writers is an artisan-legislator, it is

SECTION III.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-SIR JOHN CREVECŒUR-LETTERS OF AN

AMERICAN PLANTER-JONATHAN EDWARDS.

I have already spoken of Franklin, type of the national genius; consummate politician, subtle dialectician, a lover of the useful. His style has the qualities of his thought: good sense, lucidity, benevolence, delicate and sportive unction. He addresses himself neither to souvenirs, nor to hopes; not one shadow of passion mingles with his language. It is rustic and pleasing, a prudence which smiles. Call him prosaic and vulgar, it will not offend his shadow. His charming "Parable against Persecution," his " Poor Robin," a manual written for an infant people, whose leading-strings still guide its uncertain march; his "Examination before the Privy Council" are chefs-d'œuvre of political sagacity. One finds there, under ingenuous and ingenious forms, the suppleness of a most rare mind.

A little while before the American Revolution broke out, a book-now little known--appeared, the tone and style of which are characteristic-"The Letters of an American Cultivator." Sir John Crevecoeur, author of this work, published under the pseudonym of Hector St. John, merits an honorable place in the list of modern writers. Landscape, manners, language, sentiment, all are essentially American. The existence of the colonist is reproduced with energy and

simplicity; neither epithet nor coloring is exaggerated. You find not only the objects, but also the sensations and ideas of a new country; you see the author attaching his child's wagon to the plough which he guides, and so conducting along the furrows traced by the share, his little one and his plough, while his wife, seated under a tree at the other end of the field, knits the woollen vestments for the winter. In another place you have a duel between two serpents, the recital of which is grave and solemn as a battle of Homer; the author's strong impressions are all revealed by the style; he could not have chosen nobler words, had his heroes been Hector and Patroclus. He has vivid and graceful shading for whatever strikes him; he does not paint Nature in his closet, nor make himself a descriptive poet, but as he sees her, so he repeats her. He does not busy himself about what the saloons of London or Paris may think of his work; or whether the journals will criticise it. With what good will he mingles in the amusements of the Nantucket people! What alacrity, what a power of industry and labor are in his pages; how his heart beats in unison with every heart; how he compels us to associate ourselves with the perils of the whale-fishery; to take interest in the joyous feasts which reward those perils! How admirable in all latitudes are those two things, Strength and Joy! And is it not a rare and remarkable talent to paint them so as to make the reader share in them? This writer, so little read, attains in some parts of his work to a The American degree of dramatic interest very uncommon. war is about to break out; the low murmurs of the tempest rumble from afar; the Indians are menacing to raise the warwhoop and to pour down upon the inland plantation. The colony hardly formed, may fall. These presagings sadden you; and when you close the book, you have need to be reassured by History and to convince yourself that the terrors of

the Colonist have not been realized, that the Colonial Hercules has strangled the serpents which attacked his cradle.

The third remarkable writer whom we encounter in the literary annals of America, is a logician whose celebrity does not seem to have been widely propagated in Europe, but whose merits cannot be denied. Jonathan Edwards, an ecclesiastic, born in Massachusetts, has written a Treatise on the Will," which ranks him with the subtlest writers. It is a man who does not wish to persuade you but to convince himself. He has not a subterfuge, not an evasion, not a sophism. If an objection presents itself he does not strive, either to disguise or enfeeble it. Read him, and you will think Hobbes dogmatic and Priestly insolent. It is with perfect good faith that he tries to clear up the inextricable difficulties into which his thought is plunged as soon as he approaches the theories of Free will.

In these three writers you admire a fertile naïveté, a happy facility, a ripened, sagacious reason-but no imagination. The American Cultivator only, by the freshness of his pictures, exhibits a sort of originality.

Franklin is like Fenelon, Bunyan, Addison. In Jonathan Edwards there is something of the firm, neat, pressing argument of Descartes; impassioned eloquence and poetic imagination are wanting to the whole three.

SECTION IV.

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS-THE AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT-PARIS OBSERVED FROM 1789 TO 1492 BY A FOUNDER OF THE AMERI

CAN CONFEDERATION.

Imagination is not found either in Gouverneur Morris, a diplomatist, a distinguished observer, an intelligent and an honest man, endowed with a quick enough sagacity, a right judgment, and a coolness which serves him in a crisis, and which permits him to pass peaceably through the French Revolution.

Morris never exposed himself rashly; never went to meet danger; but when there was necessity, urgency, duty, he halted, showed a calm face and braved the peril; it is one of the finest qualities of the American character. His speeches in Congress and his notes contributed powerfully to the good organization of the confederate democracy, and above all of American finance. Friend of Washington, he became intimate with every one of those strangers who offered their services to the new Republic during its struggle-the Marquis de Lafayette-" The others," (says Washington, in a letter to Morris,) (6 are adventurers whom the waste of their own resources sends to us, or spies paid by foreign governments to watch our movements, or men whose souls are given up to a vain desire of glory, which would make them sacrifice the holiest interests to their personal ambition."

When that great and fine Revolution of America, so little stained with innocent blood, so noble and so grave, was terminated, and Washington, instead of seeking the first rank in the new federal empire, sought by every honest means to

escape from his own glory, and the ordinary recompenses of ambition, Gouverneur Morris, whose fortune was considerable, whose social position excellent, desired to visit Europe. Washington gave him several letters to his friends, and charged him a characteristic detail-" to buy him at Paris, a flat gold watch, without any ornament; not," says the letter, "the watch of a fool or of a man who desires to make a show, but of which the interior construction shall be extremely well cared for, and the exterior air very simple."

Morris started for France, from whence he wrote to his friends, between 1789 and 1792 a great many letters, which Jared Sparks, one of the most indefatigable biographers of the United States, published in 1802 with the life of his compatriot Morris. Biography, treated as Jared Sparks treats it, is by no means amusing; it is a Chinese screen, without perspective, where all is on the same flat, all the incidents. have the same importance. Yet I like this style without style, this good faith of an honest business man better than the charms of the rhetoric biographer.

The political acts of Morris, citizen of the United States, were honorable without being brilliant. The qualities of his mind were essentially American; a penetrating good sense, and a great taste for order and economy; a gentle and benevolent severity in his way of judging men; and in matters of fortune a consummate prudence and exemplary patience. The spirit of a-propos and clever sally was not wanting to his character any more than to Franklin: not the only likeness between them, for they had the same cool temperament, the same Socratic look into things. Morris having never been obliged to fight against fortune, nourished more epicurean tartes, and resigned himself more easily to the brilliant and conversational idleness of great cities. He had also some good old habitual sins, gastronomy, for instance, and the love