1.  Captain John Smith. A True Relation of Virginia, Deane’s edition.  Boston:  1866.

2.  Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana.  Hartford:  1820.

3.  Samuel Sewall. Diary.  Massachusetts Historical Collections.  Fifth Series.  Vols. v, vi, and vii.  Boston:  1878.

4.  Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Various Occasions.  Vol. vii of Edwards’s Works.  Edited by Sereno Dwight.  New York:  1829.

5.  Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography.  Edited by John Bigelow.  Philadelphia:  1869. [J.  B. Lippincott & Co.]

6. Essays and Bagatelles.  Vol. ii of Franklin’s Works.  Edited by Jared Sparks.  Boston:  1836.

7.  Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American Literature. 1607-1765.  New York:  1878. [G.  P. Putnam’s Sons.]

[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds, Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket_, etc.

[Transcriber’s Note:  The word “Ogge” was transliterated from the Greek characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.]

CHAPTER II.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

1765-1815.

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period.  This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.  Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years of construction.  But the men who led the movement for independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of the whole period is one and the same.  The character of the age was as distinctly political as that of the colonial era—­in New England at least—­was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow its interest from history.  Pure literature, or what, for want of a better term, we call belles lettres, was not born in America until the nineteenth century was well under way.  It is true that the Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these were strictly for the home market.  They hardly penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke.  Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due course in the present chapter.  It is also true that one or two of Irving’s early books fall within the last years of the period now under consideration.  But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.