it is in a sense a very old’ nation.  It has had a perfectly new and magnificent field for its energies, and it has made a sweep of the old conventions; but it cannot get rid of its inheritance of temperament; and I think that, so far as I can judge, it is too anxious to emphasize its sense of revolt, its consciousness of newness of life.  Whitman himself would not be so anxious to declare the ennui of the old, if he did not feel himself in a way trammelled by it.  The moment that a case is stated with any vehemence, that moment it is certain that the speaker has antagonists in his eye.  There is a story of Professor Blackie at Edinburgh making a tirade against the stuffiness of the old English universities to Jowett, the incisive Master of Balliol.  At the end, he said generously, “I hope you people at Oxford do not think that we are your enemies up here?” “No,” said Jowett drily; “to tell the truth, we don’t think about you at all!” The man who is really making a new beginning, serenely confident in his strength, does not, as Professor Blackie did, concern himself with his predecessors at all.  Perhaps, indeed, the democratic spirit of America may be quietly glorying in its strength, and may be merely waiting till it suits it to speak.  But I do not think it can be said to have found full expression.  It seems to me—­I may well be wrong—­that in matters of culture, the American is far more seriously bent on knowing what has been done in the past even than the Englishman.  The Englishman takes the past for granted; he is probably more deeply and instinctively penetrated with its traditions than he knows; but ever since the Romantic movement began in England, about a century ago, the general tendency is anarchical and anti-classical.  Writers like Wordsworth, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, had very little deference about them.  They did not even trouble to assert their independence; they said what they thought, and as they thought it.  But the spirit of American literature does not on the whole appear to me to be a democratic spirit.  It has not, except in the case of Walt Whitman himself, shown any strong tendency to invent new forms or to ventilate new ideas.  It has not broken out into crude, fresh, immature experiments.  It has rather worked as the Romans did, who anxiously adopted and imitated Greek models, admiring the form but not comprehending the spirit.  A revolt in literary art, such as the Romantic movement in England, has no time to concern itself with the old forms and traditions.  Writers like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, had far too much to say for themselves to care how the old classical schools had worked.  They used the past as a quarry, not as a model.  But the famous American writers have not originated new forms, or invented a different use of language; they have widened and freshened traditions, they have not thrown them overboard.  Neither, if I interpret facts rightly, have the Americans developed a new kind of