But in the interval between the cudgel-stroke of Johnson and the mud-throwing of Carlyle, America had grown strong enough to bear the assaults of literary bullies and mountebanks without serious annoyance.  The question which had been so superciliously asked was at last answered. Everybody reads an American book.  The morning-star of our literature rose in the genius of IRVING.  There was something in his personal conditions which singularly fitted him to introduce the New World in its holiday-dress to the polite company of the Old World.  His father was a Scotchman, his mother was an Englishwoman, and he was born in America.  “Diedrich Knickerbocker” is a near relation of some of Scott’s characters; “Bracebridge Hall” might have been written by an Englishman; while “Ichabod Crane” and “Rip Van Winkle” are American to their marrow.  The English naturally found Irving too much like their own writers in his English subjects, and they could not thoroughly relish his purely American pictures and characters.  Cooper, who did not love the English, and showed it, a navy officer, too, who dwelt with delight on the sea-fights of the War of 1812, was too American to please them.  Dr. Channing had a limited circle of admirers in Great Britain, but could reach only a few even of the proscribed Dissenting class in any effective way.

Prescott, we believe, did more than any other one man to establish the independence of American authorship.  He was the first, so far as we know, who worked with a truly adequate literary apparatus, and at the same time brought the results of his extensive, long-continued, costly researches into picture-like and popular forms.  It was not the judgment of England, but of Europe, that settled his claims in the world of letters; and from the day when the verdict of the learned world awarded him a place in the first rank of historians, the hereditary curse of American authorship was removed, and the insolent question of the Quarterly was asked no more.

From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British reading constituency.

Never had the mutual interchange of literary gifts from the one people to the other been so active as during the years preceding the outbreak of the Great Conspiracy.  So close was the communication of thought and feeling, that it seemed as if there were hardly need of a submarine cable to stretch its nervous strands between two national brains that were locked in Siamese union by the swift telegraph of thought.  We reprinted each other’s books, we made new reputations for each other’s authors, we wrote in each other’s magazines, and introduced each other’s young writers to our own several publics.  Thought echoed to thought, voice answered to voice across the Atlantic.