The intellectual development of the Colonists was narrowed and limited by the conditions of their new life.  There was no need of legislation to discourage the growth of an American literature.  At the period of the Revolution two books had been produced which had a right to live, in virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we need not count in this category the records of events, such as Winthrop’s Journal, or Prince’s Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous, conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather’s “Magnalia.”  The two real American books were a “Treatise on the Will,” and “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”  Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were the only considerable names in American literature in all that period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,—­a period embracing five generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen, philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and immortality.  The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went along.  Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state:  for religion and politics always play into each other’s hands, and the constitution is the child of the catechism.  Harvard College was dedicated to “Christ and the Church,” but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at Commencement, “Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved,”—­Samuel Adams speaking in the affirmative.

Such was the condition of America at the period just preceding the Revolutionary movement.  Commercial and industrial dependence maintained by Acts of Parliament, and only beginning to be openly rebelled against under the irritation produced by oppressive enactments.  Native development in the fields of letters and science hardly advanced beyond the embryonic stage; a literature consisting of a metaphysical treatise and a popular almanac, with some cart-loads of occasional sermons, some volumes of historical notes, but not yet a single history, such as we should now hold worthy of that name, and an indefinite amount of painful poetry.  Not a line, that we can recall, had ever been produced in America which was fit to sparkle upon the “stretched forefinger” of Time.  Berkeley’s “Westward the course of Empire” ought to have been written here; but the curse of sterility was on the Western Muse, or her offspring were too puny to live.