THE Cambridge University Press, during the last two years, has begun to issue its long-expected work on the rise and progress of American literature. The third volume has yet to come, but the exhaustive thoroughness of the first two suffice for an approximately complete impression of what the finished work will be. Nothing could have been more happily or significantly timed than the coincidence, so far as it has yet gone, of this has yet gone, of this publication with the Spa armistice of 1918, and the Paris treaty conference of the following year.

Both those events bore the impress of American sagacity and statesmanship as well as more or less disinterested loyalty to a cause which was not that of any one people or state, but of humanity and civilization.

While

these events were in progress on European soil, the best possible of American commentaries was being prepared for them in these handsome volumes, forming, as they do, not merely a record of Anglo-Saxon authorship beyond seas, but of the successive stages in the entire intellectual, moral, spiritual, not less than literary evolution of the American race. For to that, and nothing less, it will amount when the coping-stone has been placed upon an undertaking whose scale renders it colossal.

Those recently and still coöperating to raise this monument to the New World's achievement in the 'Humanities,' modestly quote the Spanish seventeenth-century adage

"To equal a

"To equal a predecessor, one must have twice his worth.' Disclaiming that qualification, the authors merely mention some distinctive features of their enterprise. It begins with the infant and almost inarticulate expressions of national thought; it brings the narrative down to the most highly polished specimens of nineteenth and twentieth-century verse or prose. It surveys the whole higher life of an entire community. Thus far it is the only work of its kind executed by scholars selected from every class and section of the American continent, Canada not excepted. To those unique characteristics one may presently return. At the outset I may just touch on the opportune emphasis with which it will remind every reader of the influence on the economy and regulation of the Old World's affairs by the absolutely new force that has entered into or associated itself with them.

National and international statesmanship grows increasingly agreed that President Wilson's plan is the world's greatest human hope. The arguments in its favor, the method and accompanying circumstances of their statement, form a contrast to the conduct of international peace procedure in all other post-war negotiations recorded by history so striking as to invite a few words now.

The earliest congress of the European Powers for universal reconstruction on anything like the same scale as the twentieth century has forced upon its sovereigns and statesmen

were the meetings at Münster, resulting in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which in things sacred, as well as secular, formed a real reconstruction of human society from one end of the world to the other. The group of international documents to which that agreement belongs includes also the Peace of Ryswick in the seventeenth century and of Utrecht in the eighteenth. The Westphalia conferences were held entirely or for the most part at Münster in Prussia, the signature took place at Hamburg. From first to last negotiations were inordinately prolonged by Franco-Spanish jealousy and by the difficulty which the official mediator, then first heard of, found in composing the private feud between the French plenipotentiaries D'Avaux and Servien.

Eventually the difficulty solved itself by the two impracticable Gaelic rivals retiring, though the Münster section of the great understanding was really the sole work of Servien for France and Trautsmandorf for the Empire. D'Avaux as well as Servien was allowed to save his face by the appearance of his signature, among the others, to the bit of paper. There was also an Austro-Swedish agreement, carried through by the famous Oxenstiern, Queen Christina's Minister, whose son received, in view of these and other transactions of the same sort, the familiar advice to 'watch and see with how little wisdom the world is governed.'

More strictly relevant to my present subject than any of the diplomatic incidents between 1648 and 1697 was the intellectual and literary atmosphere surrounding them, and more particularly the culture, with all its varied influences, breathed fifteen years after Ryswick by the promoters of the voluminous convention known as the Treaty of Utrecht in 1712 - an

understanding entirely effected by the private 'deal' between the French representative De Torcy and the English St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Treaty making was then, as it remained for many years afterwards, a stately ceremonial on severely classical lines. The preliminary Ryswick negotiations were marked by several neat little discourses about a resemblance, real or imaginary, of existing European conditions to the relations subsisting between the various little communities of classical Italy and Greece. Jonathan Swift found an occasion for commending himself afresh to his Tory patrons and giving proof of his international aptitude by his tractate on the contests and dissensions in Athens and Rome. This was written on the first prospect of the Utrecht conference, when the two Houses were at feud about the Tory impeachment of Somers and the other Whig leaders who had to do with the Partition treaty. The terrible pamphleteer soon had his reward in the chaplaincy to the Duke of Ormond. He had been guided in his choice of the subject by the best friend he ever had, Lady Betty Germaine, who could think of no other theme so likely to help him toward his ambition of connecting himself with the expected scheme of European reconstruction. "This by Swift,' said one of the dean's rivals. 'I know as a fact it was Bishop Burnet's work.' ‘And I,' rejoined Lady Betty, 'know better than fact that it is the Dean's.'

What, too, could be more exclusively classical than the scene on which the curtain rises in the spring of 1712 in the Utrecht council chamber? There, conspicuous by his handsome features, his superb periwig, and his cloak, arranged to reproduce the folds of a Roman toga, is the Alcibiades of his time, the prince of patrician profligates and pseudo-philosophers, Henry

St. John, leaning against a scagliola pillar, deep in a pocket volume of the Olynthiacs and Philippics. Near him is his French confederate De Torcy, languidly looking at rather than troubling to examine his map of Europe in one hand and the plays of Racine in the other.

And now enters the most splendid apparition of all. It is the English Lord Privy Seal, the last prelate employed on a secular mission of any kind, the Lord Bishop of Bristol. For the best part of an hour before this he has been studying in a huge lookingglass his own reflection to see whether his pose and equipment is according to the pattern as regards outline of the elder Cato, whom his facial features are supposed to resemble. His black velvet gown is adorned with golden loops; his long train is carried by two pages in ash-colored coats laced with silver orris, and waistcoats of green velvet (Complete History of Europe, 1712, page 64). In this magnificent masquerade the histrionic Bolingbroke was perhaps after all the most genuine personage. I have forgotten whether his portrait has a place in that noble collection of statesmen adorning Christchurch Hall; of that house tradition represents St. John as an alumnus. This is pure fiction, for his education began and ended at Eton. There, however, he acquired much more classics than most of his contemporaries in that classical age. Bolingbroke's differences with Marlborough did not prevent his honoring the great soldier's memory as the first minister and most consummate general our country or perhaps any other has produced.

Thackeray, who idealized the Queen Anne period and its characters, has something to say about the magnanimity shown to one another by those of its personages who were rivals.

Bolingbroke on Marlborough is a characteristic instance. From the panegyric on his achievements in peace and war, St. John shows him as a humane and compassionate man; his eagerness for fresh conquests without delay never caused him (after the manner, it may be said, of the first Napoleon) to neglect the wounded; his prisoners were always treated with kindly courtesy, while on countless other occasions he alone among our chief captains displayed a mercy and gentleness toward the fallen, equaling, if not surpassing, the tenderness and respect which after the defeat of the Persian King was lavished by Alexander the Great on his mother, wife, and daughters.

St. John's classical interests have been already mentioned. Here it may be added that for the benefit of a reverend parasite twittering the phrases somewhat inopportunely of Marlborough and himself, Bolingbroke recalled from the Odyssey, book viii, line 62, the compliment coming from Ulysses at the court of King Alcinous to the bard Demodocus who sang of the loves of Aphrodite and Ares. In the conversation which followed, with reference to the same subject, Bolingbroke not less glibly quoted a remarkable couplet from The Baccha.* Whether or not the Utrecht business gave St. John another chance of showing that he had not forgotten his Greek must be left to conjecture. The classical curriculum of his Eton time was wider and more varied than it has been since. His Letters on History still exhale a perceptibly Hellenic atmosphere and abound in signs of intimacy not only with Plutarch but Dionysius of Halicarnassus. There was plenty of arguing from or about Greek or Roman precedents, with much men

*When Bacchus goes, then Venus flies.
And out of life all pleasure dies (773-74).

tion of the Amphyctionic council and other peace-making agencies not only at the Utrecht talks but a hundred years later among the dazzlingly bestarred Vienna negotiators, who showed their reconstructive skill by pulling the world to pieces, like a dissecting map, and rather clumsily putting it together again afterwards.

In view of the creative labors on a larger scale at home as well as beyond seas, now crowding our days and bewildering our statesmen, there have been brought to light no historic examples more full of instruction, interest, and even inspiration than those collected with such consummate and original judgment by the Spectator. The pages containing these have all the practical usefulness for our world regenerators and politicians to-day that the eighteenth-century writers of the American Federalist possessed not only for the parliamentary students of that period, but for those among us who were getting up political philosophy in the nineteenth century for our final schools under teachers of such light and leading as W. W. Capes, of Queens', or W. L. Newman, of Balliol.

The special interest now attaching to all leaders of transatlantic thought and the useful suggestions still to be derived from the literary labors that accompanied the making of the American constitution, invest with a seasonable value those sections of the Cambridge History that testify to the study and thought involved in the eighteenth-century conversion of a British colony into an independent and sovereign polity. The literary preparations for that enterprise cannot at this distance of time be seen in their true perspective dimensions or significance without such knowledge of the earlier and preliminary processes as may now for the first time be fully

gathered from the volumes whose titles introduce this writing. The creation of New England, it must be remembered, did not form the first chapter in the story of British transatlantic settlement a gradual and sporadic process extending over many decades.

The year that has just opened forms the tercentenary of the Mayflower's sailing from the English Plymouth to its new-world namesake. At the time of these events in 1620, the first Anglo-American Parliament had assembled in Virginia. It was the epoch of adventurous corporations; the Virginia Company came to birth in the city of London (1607), after Sir Walter Raleigh's imprisonment put an end to the schemes he had formed for peopling the New World. As colonial leader, Raleigh was followed by a Lincolnshire farmer's son, John Smith, whose vicissitudes and exploits, even during his lifetime, in Thucydidean phrase, 'won their way to the fabulous.'

The diversity of English classes and characters brought together in a strange land contained the germ of those differences, social, intellectual, religious, and political, which were afterwards to form lines of cleavage in American life, letters, and polity. The original Virginia settlers were mostly English gentlemen desirous of reproducing in their fresh home the free patrician life they had left behind, bent also on parceling out the country into large estates, cultivated by slave labor imported from Africa. On that basis there soon rose up a wealthy trading class, whose capital had made them masters of the tobacco commerce. They were entirely free from any of the scruples expressed by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower about dealing with foreign negroes as servile and soulless chattels,

These had for their northern neighbors in the district known as New England, with Massachusetts as its capital, a community who knew refinements of life in their English homes. Accustomed from childhood to work with their hands, they were sprung from ancestors whom the smaller squires, like Pym and Hampden, the backbone of the opposition to Charles, might have enrolled among their troops, or Cromwell might have disciplined into his 'Ironsides.' Closer contiguity might have precipitated a rupture between the two dissimilar communities. Against that danger the vast tracts of unoccupied territory separating the two was not the only guaranty. The intervening Hudson River formed a natural barrier whose strength had been increased by the rise on its shores of the populous Dutch centre, New Amsterdam, eventually to grow into New York.

The antagonisms now mentioned colored the entire course of American thought and writing from the fifteenth or sixteenth century onward, till the complete amalgamation of the miscellaneous elements in transatlantic civilization and culture. The patriotic note was sounded in American authorship long before any native touch appeared either in diction or subject. In 1612 Captain John Smith took up the pen to defend his adopted home from the slanders attacking it. "The country itself is not at fault, but does not yet abound in taverns, ale-houses for every breathing place, and all the unwholesome dainties of the old home.'

Almost contemporary with Smith was the only writer of the period whose prose possessed merit or vitality. Thomas Carlyle found in Robert Sedgwick, a prosperous Massachusetts settler, the only writer who told him anything worth knowing. All the productions of this time, chiefly books

and pamphlets, were only quarries for authors of a later day, the materials issued or patronized by the various transatlantic companies of literature rather than literature itself. They fulfilled, however, a useful purpose in that they supplied the English Government of the time with records as abundant as they were disjointed and con fused about the course of events and the state of feeling in New England.

Thus Robert Sedgwick was commissioned by Cromwell to send him the latest news on every opportunity as to what the Dutch were doing on the Hudson, the French in Acadia, the Spanish in Jamaica. Those subjects were not of much interest to the colonists themselves, who rather sought relief from the toils and cares of their working life in meditations on the New Jerusalem which they were in process of raising in their new home. The Account of God's Protecting Providence in the Remarkable Deliverance of Robert Barrow and Great exercises in much patience during the time of greatest troubles were the titles borne by some among the most popular of the fugitive publications whose authors believed themselves in as close communion with their Creator, as much under His protection from day to day and minute to minute, as the Hebrew priests of old, with their "Urim' and 'Thummim,' or the hosts of Israel, as, delivered from Egyptian bondage and Red Sea perils, they began to establish themselves in Canaan.

The literary growths of such a spiritual soil continued, even as the eighteenth century approached, to be wild, extravagant, and rank. Fanaticism may have been seldom followed by a reaction against faith. It was, however, for the most part overgrown by the experiences of the often illiterate emotionalism of those who saw visions, dreamed dreams, and fancied