As English policy had pursued the uniform course of provincializing our industry during the colonial period, discouraging every form of native ingenuity, so English criticism, naturally enough, after industry was set free, discountenanced the growth of a native American literature.  That famous question of the “Quarterly Review,” “Who reads an American book?” was the key—­note of the critical chorus.  There were shortcomings enough, no doubt, and all the faults that belong to an imperfectly educated people.  But there was something more than the feeling of offended taste or unsatisfied scholarship in the animus of British criticism.  Mr. Tudor has expressed the effect it produced upon our own writers very clearly in his account of the “North American Review,” written in 1820.  He recognizes the undue deference paid to foreign critics, and, as its consequence, “a want, or rather a suppression, of national feeling and independent judgment, that would sooner or later have become highly injurious.”

It is not difficult to find examples, of earlier and of later date, which illustrate the tone of British feeling towards this country, as it has existed among leading literary men, and at times betrayed itself in an insolence which amuses us after the first sense of irritation has passed away.

In 1775, Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English literature, the “Great Moralist,” the typical Englishman of his time, wrote the pamphlet called “Taxation no Tyranny.”  It is what an Englishman calls a “clever” production, smart, epigrammatic, impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption.  No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New.  Its inhabitants—­the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—­multiply, as he tells us, “with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes.”  Of the fathers of our Revolution he speaks in no more flattering terms:—­“Probably in America, as in other places, the chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to rob in the tumults of a conflagration, and toss brands among a rabble passively combustible.”  All these atrocities and follies amuse and interest us now; they are the coprolites of a literary megatherium, once hateful to gods and men, now inoffensive and curious fossilized specimens.

In 1863, a Scotchman, whom Dr. Johnson would have hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist.  The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for “Punch,” a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter is its melancholy apology.