brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season.  Southern intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not profundity, was the passport to popularity.  Hence, Southern hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen) became almost as proverbial in the polite circles of America and Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the French.  And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South, shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners.  But the shadow alone remains; the substance has departed—­“There are no birds in last year’s nest.”

If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men—­fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention—­the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians.  But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South.  True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light; but even their work, as an index of Southern genius, is regarded as highly precocious and tentative.

The South has yet to demonstrate that she has capacity for high literary effort.  In the process of that demonstration, I am fully persuaded that the Anglo-African—­with his brilliant wit and humor, his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for literary pursuits—­will contribute largely to give the South an enviable and honorable position.

What the South lacked in literary effort before the war she made up in a magnificent galaxy of meteoric statesmen, who rushed into politics with the instinct of ducks taking to water, and who were forgotten, in the majority of cases, before they had run out their ephemeral career.  A few names have survived the earthquake, and are remembered for their cleverness rather than their depth.  A few more decades, and they will be remembered only by the curious student who plods his weary way through the labyrinth of Congressional records and the musty archives of States, seeking for data of times which long ago passed into the hazy vista of history and romance.  Before the war the Southern man of leisure took to politics more as a pastime than as a serious business.  But as the pastime was agreeable, and as it gave additional weight and distinction, all those who could, strived to make it appear that they were men of importance in the Nation.  They were largely a nation of politicians, always brilliant, shallow, bellicose and dogmatic, as ready to decide an argument with the shotgun or saber as with reason and logic.

This was the temper of the people who rushed into the war with the confidence of a schoolboy and who limped out like a man overtaken in his gymnastic exercise by a paralytic stroke.  The war taught the South a very useful lesson, but did not sufficiently convince it that it was preeminently a supercilious, arrogant people, who did not and do not possess all the virtue, intelligence, and courage of the country; that its stock of these prime elements is woefully small considering the long years it had posed as America’s own patrician class.