It is interesting to observe that at the same time, perhaps from the same cause, the theo logical literature of America becomes less and less interesting. The mind and heart and soul and strength of the educated men of America was steadily drifting into an interest in the present relations between God and man and the present sway of the eternal law, much more important to men and women, and among the rest, of men of letters, than theological explana tions of the secrets of the universe. The student of to-day finds it worth while to read the publications of Thomas Mayhew, of Boston, of Dr. Witherspoon, of Princeton, of Dr. Samuel Johnson, of New York. But this is not because he cares so much for what is called theology in its narrow definition, but because these men enter as champions of the people into that larger theology of men who really believe that they themselves and all men may be par takers of the divine nature.
Franklin with his genuine instinct for °To gether' did not live long in Philadelphia with out bringing together one and another club of men of inquiring disposition. One of these clubs still exists in the American Philosophical Society. Another founded the fire department of Philadelphia. And, indeed, most of the activities which had given that city distinction, even before 1775, may be traced to such origins. Franklin's own newspaper, the Evening Post, may be spoken of as really a literary journal. Poor Richard's Almanac was not only an index of time and weather, but it was in its way a philosophical treatise. It was soon trans lated into French. Le Bonhomme Richard was known in French hamlets which knew nothing of the tea tax or the stamp tax. So soon as peace was declared such institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as the Massachusetts Historical Society, as Tam many in New York, which was originally a scientific and philanthropic institution, came into being. The governors of the colleges took new courage; and commencements and the cele brations which accompanied them gave good occasions for such appeals or lamentations with regard to an American literature, or the want of it, as gave a healthy stimulus to the literary life of the new nation.
A curious illustration of the increasing con fidence in home and the literature of home, as years went by, would be found in the series of college addresses of which the first were pub lished at Cambridge in 1796. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776 at William and Mary College in Virginia, soon outgrew its first limitations; and its annual exercises at Cam bridge and New Haven were attended by grad uate members who liked to renew their college memories. Branches of it were founded in Brown College in Providence, in Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and as years passed on, in other similar institutions. The early
addresses by scholarly men in these societies were almost uniformly exhortation that the people of America might pay more attention to scholarship and literature. Meanwhile, and under such incentives, there grew up of course, in one centre or another, small coteries of literary men and literary women. With an amusing regard to tradition such men seemed to have felt that there could be no literature without an epic or two on which it should be built. Timothy Dwight's 'Conquest of Canaan,' Joel Barlow's which are all but forgotten, and several others which are for gotten, were the results, almost of a sense of duty in this regard. No one can suppose that either of these men was inspired by any divine inflatus of the poet. As you read the dreary lines you feel that the writer thought that there must be an epic and that because there must be he would write it, with the same feeling that a column of soldiers storms a redoubt. By the side of such men, however, there came men and women who loved to clothe great thoughts with charming or fitting dress.
It is interesting to see that almost all of the early books which we should now class as "efforts° in literature were published by sub scription. And there is something pathetic in the memoirs of the earlier literary men where they describe their personal visits from place to place as they solicited subscriptions to pay for the printing of their books. President Dwight himself visited the camp of Washing ton in 1775 and obtained the subscription of Washington and the other distinguished men around him for the publication of the 'Conquest of Canaan.' The reader must remember that the practical introduction of stereotyping in England or America is as late as the beginning of the 19th century. It was necessary, there fore, to test the market in some way when a book was first printed, so that the printer or publisher or author might know how many copies should be printed. It must be remem bered, also, that the printers had no capital which would enable them to keep in type the cumbrous pages of a book which passed the size of a pamphlet. Paine's 'Common Sense,' in 1776, was probably the first book which attained at once a circulation in the least approaching the large editions of to-day. The trade, as the book-selling community still likes to call itself, now begins putting out as a feeler a small edi tion printed from stereotypes. In our day in a vault in the side of a mountain, or perhaps in a vault under a sidewalk we preserve such plates from which a book has been printed, and ac cording as the demand may prove, new editions can be issued at a comparatively small expense. But up to the year 1813 there was no such resource.