AMERICAN LITERATURE. The history of American literature is the history of the slow differentiation from the parent stock of a transplanted language and culture. Beginning as an off shoot from English literature it gradually differentiated in manner and matter as diverse experience thrust the two peoples apart, un til it has finally come to be the expression of a culture greatly different from the culture of England. For a generation it was written by Englishmen resident in America ; for upwards of years it was written by colonials who looked overseas for inspira tion and models; and only within comparatively recent times has it come wholly to disregard English example and express itself individually. Up to the year 1800 it was still frankly colonial in temper, reflecting the successive schools and styles of contem porary England, imitative, diffident and provincial. It imported its literary modes from London along with its wigs and small clothes, having due regard however to the sober colonial pro prieties and rarely following the extremes of London fashion.
In its beginnings American literature just missed being a child of the great age of Elizabeth. The splendour of Elizabethan times was already fading when the first English settlements were made; and the sober Puritans who constituted the bulk of the emigrants were men to whom that splendour was no other than the lure of the devil. In consequence the literary manner transported to the new world was Jacobean instead of Elizabethan—a mode involved and self-conscious, given a sobering cast by an absorbing theo logical interest, and wrought into grotesque shapes by the tempests that shook England during the days of Charles and Laud. It is this heavy Jacobean manner that was impressed on the first con siderable body of writings in America ; and Jacobean the colonial mind remained till well on into the next century. It put away its theological prepossessions with much reluctance, and it was only after long hesitation and with a certain provincial awkward ness that it accepted the brisker modes of Augustan England. The cultural soil proved none of the friendliest to the heroic couplet and the jaunty satire of Pope and Churchill; polite circles in Philadelphia and Boston laboured somewhat too consciously to acquire the air of a wit ; nevertheless by the third quarter of the i8th century the Augustan mode had come pretty generally to prevail and a sprightly rationalism pushed aside the old Jacobean heaviness.