Annapolis, practised law and became district attorney in Washington. His poetic fame rests chiefly on The Star-Spangled Banner. Samuel Francis Smith, D. D. (1808-1895), was a clergyman, editor of various religious publications, and author of many hymns, of which the most famous is America. (For a tribute by his distinguished classmate Holmes, see the Harvard reunion poem, The Boys, p. 703, above.) Samuel Woodworth (17851842) was an author and journalist of moderate abliity, best known for The Old Oaken Bucket and The Forest Rose (a play), and for his part in founding the New York Mirror. John Howard Payne (1792-1852), actor and playwright, carried on his dramatic work chiefly in England, and after retiring from the stage became American consul at Tunis. George Pope Morris (1802-1864) was one of the founders of the New York Mirror, which he edited for twenty years. He was among the ablest early American journalists, and financially the most successful songwriter of his day. NOTES HAIL COLUMBIA 227. Written in 1798, when Congress had put Washington in command of the army, and it was generally thought that the United States would have to take one side or the other in the war between England and France. THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER During the War of 1812, Key, with a flag of truce, went aboard one of the British vessels to arrange for the exchange of prisoners. While still aboard the enemy ship, he witnessed the prolonged but unsuccessful bombardment of one of the defenses of Baltimore, Fort McHenry, which the British Admiral had boasted he would carry in a few hours. AMERICA 228. Written and published in 1832. HOME, SWEET HOME 229. First sung in Payne's opera, Clari, the Maid of Milan, at Covent Garden, London, in 1823. WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE 230. One of Morris's friends had such pleasant childhood associations with an old tree near Bloomingdale, N. Y., that he paid ten dollars to have it preserved from the woodman's axe. Morris happened to be present when the contract was made, and this poem is the result. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN The literary reputation of Charles Brockden Brown rests principally on the fact that he was the first American to make authorship his sole profession, and the first to write a series of novels that met with some appreciable success. He was eager to prove that an American could write fiction, with strictly American backgrounds, in a style sufficiently elegant to enable his work to compete with the great novels produced in England during the eighteenth century. Seldom has a novelist taken himself so seriously, or aimed with such naïve assurance at a mark so hopelessly beyond his reach. Taking William Godwin's story of criminal oppression, Caleb Williams, as his model, and imitating in his general plan the horror-piled-on-horror method of the "Gothic” romances, he chanced by ill luck to adopt a style so pedantic and Latinized that his works survive today partly as literary curiosities. Yet despite the crudities of style, and, in some parts, of construction, his best book, Wieland, continues to be read for its vigorous depicting of terror as a force in human life. Brown had a power which breaks through the barrier of literary immaturity and gives life to a kind of writing that in most particulars was out of date when he wrote it. During his seven most productive years (1798-1804) Brown published six novels: Wieland, which was written in a single month, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Clara Howard, and Jane Talbot. Almost without exception the atmosphere of these tales is gloomy and morbid, suffused with the miasma of yellow fever, madness, or murder. Towards the latter part of his brief life, his literary efforts took a more wholesome turn, and he became the editor of various magazines, but his health gave way and he died of consumption in 1810. It is a commonplace of literary criticism that his talent was admirably suited for writing the short story, but he missed the opportunity, which was promptly seized by Poe and Hawthorne. BIBLIOGRAPHY The best edition of Brown's novels is that published by David Mackay, Philadelphia, 1887, 6 vols. John Erskine's chapter on Brown, in his Leading American Novelists, N. Y. 1910, is a good biographical and critical sketch. NOTES WIELAND 230. The story is told in the first person by Wieland's sister Clara, who has lived happily in a secluded part of Pennsyl vania with her brother and his family, and who is about to marry, when Carwin, the malignant man of mystery, comes upon the scene. Chapter VI, the selection included in this volume, describes the peculiar personality of this villain, and gives an instance of his uncanny influence. Towards the end of the book it is made clear that the horrors and tragedies recounted are all caused by Carwin's amazing power as a ventriloquist, which enables him to play upon the credulity of his victims until he drives Wieland into a homicidal mania and forever separates the innocent sister from her betrothed. IES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851) mes Fenimore Cooper was born in Burton, N. J., in 1789, but the family moved n he was only one year old to the beauI wilderness of lakes and mountains in t is now called Cooperstown, N. Y. Here boy came to know the forest trails and primeval forest itself in a way that stood in good stead later, when he was writing Leatherstocking Tales. For a time he hed likely to go through the commone experiences of school and college, but a mptory dismissal from Yale forced him scenes of greater interest. In a word, father, Judge Cooper, thought the disne of the Navy desirable for one who d not accommodate himself to college =; as a preliminary step the youth bed on a merchantman, the Sterling, and a year sailed the Atlantic, gathering, all nowingly, material for the sea stories were destined to be almost as famous is tales of the Indians. After many exg adventures, including saving a comrade drowning and being chased by pirates, listed in the Navy, where he acquitted elf creditably as a midshipman. His iage in 1811 to Miss DeLancey, a woman ronounced Tory leanings, made it undele for him to fight against England in War of 1812, and on resigning his comon he settled down to the life of a cry gentleman, his active career appar over. er several years there came the trifling ent which changed the course of his life: -pressed the opinion that he could write ter novel than one he happened to be ng; and, challenged by his wife, atted to do so. The result, Precaution ), scarcely justified his boast; but with ppearance of The Spy in 1821 he estabhimself as an author of note. Within ext three years he wrote The_Pioneers, ng Natty Bumppo, and The Pilot-the a frank attempt to better the seamandisplayed by Sir Walter Scott in The e. In these two volumes he showed his t two distinct types of story, on which he rang the changes with marked success for over twenty-five years. Both in New York City and on his extensive travels in Europe he was a popular favorite, but at times his published criticisms of both American and European ways of life involved him in unnecessary and fruitless controversy. His declining years, like his early childhood, were spent in happiness among the lakes which play so large a part in his novels. He died at Cooperstown, in 1850, having requested his family to authorize no biography, for he felt that he had been misunderstood by his contemporaries, and would inevitably be misrepresented in whatever might be written. Two volumes of his correspondence, however, recently (1922) edited by his grandson, provide an excellent source for a study of his later years. The advance in fiction as one turns from the first American novelist of importance, Charles Brockden Brown, to the second, Cooper, is so great as scarcely to permit a comparison of their worth. As has already been pointed out (p. 1132), Brown's priority is his chief claim to recognition; Cooper, on the other hand, wrote thirty-two romances, of which half a dozen are still popular throughout western Europe and the United States, while a dozen more were widely read during the author's lifetime. Books which weather the literary storms of a century show some promise of permanence, and there is reason to believe that Cooper may be among the immortals. He created a new type the romance of the sea, with which Defoe, Smollett, and Scott had toyed without recognizing its latent possibilities; moreover, he created the novel of frontier life dealing principally with the American Indians. And in creating these two types he wrote with such freshness and vigor that his sea stories have been surpassed only seldom, and his Indian stories never. On the other hand, there is not one of Cooper's many books which can be praised without reservation: at times the dialogue is tedious, the moralizing is painful, and the style is atrocious. Suspense is frequently prolonged to the point of fatigue, and the more exciting incidents frankly tax the reader's credulity. (See Mark Twain's incisive criticism in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," an essay in the volume entitled How to Tell a Story and other Essays.) On the whole, Cooper's romances are unique in their absurd mixture of literary faults and merits. Cooper has often been called "the American Scott," but the comparison throws very little light on the secret of his amazing power as a story-teller. A contrast of Cooper with Hawthorne is far more illuminating. thorne's work is not popular on the Continent because the act of translation, by blurring the delicacy of his literary etchings, Haw spoils his chief glory. Cooper's style, on the other hand, is so clumsy that it loses nothing by any reasonable translation-nay, it often gains; and his works have gripped French and German readers just as forcibly as they have English and American. If we set down several essential elements of fiction and arrange them according to the abundance in which Cooper possessed them, we find something like this: first, stirring action; second, interesting settings accurately described; third, character portrayal; and fourth, style. If we reverse the order, making greatest what was least in Cooper, and so on, the result is surprisingly close to an analysis of Hawthorne's peculiar literary equipment. or In the larger phases of authorship, then, Cooper had an unusual talent-in selecting a story worth telling, devising a plot or plan, and in portraying acts of physical prowess set off against a background of ocean forest. He is at his best when his hero stands at the helm of a storm-tossed vessel, steering among uncharted shoals along some secret channel known only to him, while the waves dash over the bow and the crew cower in fear of death; or when a helpless maiden (somewhat unromantically called a "female") is being carried off by Indians to some forest fastness whence her lover can rescue her only with the aid of the ubiquitous guide, Natty Bumppo. For the minute details of technique, in dealing with which Hawthorne had no peer, Cooper had no flair; but his vitality has proved sufficient to make his work survive. And one of his characters, Natty Bumppo, variously known as Deerslayer, Hawkeye, or Pathfinder, seems already to have attained immortality. BIBLIOGRAPHY EDITIONS. The first collected edition of Cooper's works-though far from completeappeared in New York, in 1854, in 33 volumes. A good modern one is that published by Putnam's, 32 vols. BIOGRAPHIES. The standard biography is T. R. Lounsbury's James Fenimore Cooper, N. Y. 1883. To supplement this the student should consult The Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, New Haven, 1922, 2 vols. Of critical articles the following-representing many different points of view and methods of approach-are all significant: Balzac's Fenimore Cooper et Walter Scott, in La Revue Parisienne, 25 July, 1840; Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, first published in the North American Review, July, 1895; Parkman's James Fenimore Cooper, North American Review, January, 1852; W. C. Brownell's Cooper, in his American Prose Masters, N. Y. 1909. Preston A. Barba's Cooper in Germany, Bloomington, Indiana, 1914, contains much information on one phase of Cooper's European vogue. NOTES THE PILOT 236. The Pilot (1824) was written in an attempt to surpass, at least in nautical accuracy, Scott's Pirate. Several of the exploits of the hero, Gray, are modelled after those of the American naval commander, John Paul Jones, whom Gray was intended to represent. To readers not famiilar with the complicated problem of handling an oldfashioned ship, it may be briefly explained that a square-rigged vessel cannot "point up" within forty-five degrees of the wind, and that her drift sideways is so great that she does not actually go in the direction she is headed; progress against the wind is thus made by a series of diagonals, with the complicated manoeuver of either "tacking ship” or "wearing ship" at each turn. "Tacking ship," or coming about, involves changing the position of all sails set, and getting them to draw on the other side; and if the vessel loses her momentum during the turn, she becomes unmanageable. In the passage here reproduced, Cooper has shown how a ship should be "tacked" through a narrow and tortuous channel, between unmarked shoals, with strong tidal currents, in a gale of wind. Under such conditions if too little sail be carried, there is not speed enough to make the vessel steer properly; if too much sail be carried, the masts break and a wreck is inevitable; under some conditions it is well-nigh impossible to find the happy medium. 237. a. 33. To be taken aback. To be caught without momentum, the vessel heading into the wind, and the sails drawing backwards. 238. b. 11. See all clear for stays. Everything ready for tacking. THE DEERSLAYER 243. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales set forth different periods in the life of an American woodsman who was constantly in contact with Indians, both friendly and hostile. The chronological order of the stories with reference to the life of the hero is: The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), and The Prairie (1827)-a fact easily remembered because (as pointed out in Bronson's American Literature, p. 132 the titles run in alphabetical order. In the first of these volumes the hero is called Deerslayer. Though of pure white blood, he lives as companion of Chingachgook, chief of the friendly Delaware Indians. With his famous long rifle, Killdeer, Deerslayer helps defend both the Delawares and the white settlers from raids by the savage Hurons. The situation in Chapter XXIX is that Deerslayer, having been captured by the Hurons, refuses to marry the squaw Sumach, whose husband and brother he has killed. He is accordingly condemned to death by torture. . b. 19. He had not been made woman. The Delaware Indians had been conquered by the Iroquois, disarmed, and forced to adopt the sobriquet of "women." a. 11. Gesler's apple. In Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, Tell is obliged by Gesler to show his skill with the crossbow by shooting an apple from his own son's head. WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859) o say that Irving was the first American yist who wrote with charm and urbanity, first American biographer and historian • presented the results of scholarly investion in a thoroughly readable fashion, the first American who won any large ience by the exercise of his native humor, O put the case for him bluntly but truth7. To add to this the statement that he was first American who was an artist in prose not merely a maker of books, who was in ty a man of letters, not by accident, but use his life-long ambition was to be a er of good prose, is to make the picture incomplete. With him American prose ature came into its majority. e was born in New York City in April, . His Scottish father and English mother no hesitation over naming one of their sons for that American who had just en the British from New York, and Irving r tired of telling how General Washingat the time of his first inauguration as Ident, patted his head and told him to be od boy. Interestingly enough, this man whom he was named, and whose accolade as proud to have received, was the subof Irving's last work and greatest biogy, completed in the year of Irving's own In 1806 he was admitted to the New York Bar, and for the rest of his life-like Sir Walter Scott, one of his English friends-was nominally an attorney. Like Scott, however, he found literature more pleasing than law, and was a barrister only in name. His first venture into the world of letters came in 1807, when, in collaboration with James K. Paulding, he issued a series of sketches or essays known today as The Salmagundi Papers. Two years later these locally amusing skits were entirely forgotten in the applause that followed the publication of the Knickerbocker History of New York. After the War of 1812 had ended, Irving once more went abroad, this time as English representative of an importing firm in which he and his brothers were partners. Disliking the work heartily, but enjoying to the full his experiences in England, he seems almost to have welcomed bankruptcy in 1818; for the failure of the business left him free to give all his time to literature. In 1819-1820 the publication of The Sketch-Book showed that his time had been well spent. At once he found himself famous-the friend of Scott, Southey, and their contemporaries. Bracebridge Hall, another collection of essays, followed in 1822; in 1828 he entered a different field with the Life of Columbus. To fit himself for this biographical work Irving had begun his studies of Spanish history; the fascination of the field proved so great that in 1829 he published The Conquest of Granada, and in 1832 The Legends of the Alhambra. By this time he was known as historian and scholar as well as essayist; his fame was as great in Europe as in America. Returning to New York in 1832, with the Oxford doctorate and medal of the Royal Society of Literature as testimonials of his prestige abroad, he lived for ten years in quiet happiness, somewhat reluctantly going abroad again in 1842 as Minister to Spain. His Life of Goldsmith had been published in 1840, and had been at once received as the best biography of that Englishman whom Irving has so often been said to resemble. Returning from Spain in 1846, he spent the remaining thirteen years of his life at "Sunnyside," Tarrytown. His last work, The Life of George Washington, was published in 1859; shortly afterwards his own life ended. No one reads The Sketch-Book or Bracebridge Hall without realizing that in the difficult rôle of familiar essayist, Irving ranks close to the masters of the type. Learning much from Addison and Goldsmith, and finding much of his inspiration from the English country life which they had known a century before, he never lost his enjoyment of the Hudson River scenery and stories-one is almost tempted to say folk-lore-with which he had come in contact during his early wanderings in search of health, and in treating which he wrote his best-known essays. Eng lish though he may be by virtue of his literary ancestry, and often by virtue of his subject matter, he is never quite so effective as in Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where the material Owes nothing to foreign influence. (It is interesting to note that t the very time Irving was bringing out these early essays, Bryant was publishing his first volume of what may be called native American poetry, a fortyfour page booklet issued in 1821. It is also interesting to remember that had neither man published anything after this date, his fame would have been secure.) Irving's historical work came after his most popular essays had been published, and added much to his contemporary reputation. Nor have these longer, more pretentious volumes ceased, with the passing of time, to exert the charm which the first readers found in them. The Columbus, the Goldsmith, and the Washington, are still vivid, colorful biographies, biographies which no "mere essayist" could have written, but which demanded the patience and learning of the scholar as well as the literary skill of the trained craftsman. And whoever would delight once more in the romance and legends of old Spain, must still turn to the Alhambra and Conquest of Granada, books which Irving wrote with all the enthusiasm of his American youth, albeit in an approximation to the idiom of his English masters. Yet when all is said and done one wonders whether Irving's claim to our gratitude does not rest more firmly upon the Knickerbocker History than upon anything else. Pure burlesque at first, almost a parody, as was Joseph Andrews in its opening chapters, the book rapidly outgrew its original purpose of laughing at a ponderous historical treatise, and became that most difficult but admirable thing, a work of art done in the spirit of broad comedy. Here one sees announced, sixty years in advance, the humor which Mark Twain was to tag as "American," and to send over all the world. Here is the mingling of the serious and the comic, of actual fact and stark impossibility, here the colossal exaggeration, the fabulous yarn told with the gravest of faces, that, rightly or wrongly, are considered parts of America's distinctive literary privilege. To be sure, the satire in the book offended some of the Dutch families living along the lower Hudson; but Sir Walter Scott liked it all immensely, and eagerly sought out the young author to thank him for having written a great and enjoyable book. The verdict of a hundred years coincides with Scott's. BIBLIOGRAPHY EDITIONS. An admirable collected edition of Irving's work is the Knickerbocker, Putnam's N. Y. 1897, 40 vols. Reprints of indi. vidual titles are so numerous as not to be worth listing. BIOGRAPHIES. C. D. Warner's Washington Irving (A. M. L. series), Boston, revised edition 1894, and H. W. Boynton's Washington Irving, Boston, 1901, are good biographical and critical studies. More detailed information may be found in P. M. Irving's The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, N. Y. 1862-64, 4 vols., revised edition 1883. The Journals of Washington Irving, ed. W. P. Trent and G. S. Hellman, Boston, 1919, 3 vols., make available a mass of material that throws much new light on Irving's literary methods. CRITICAL ARTICLES. An attempt to list American articles dealing with Irving would be futile; but because of his long and intimate connection with England the following British criticisms are of particular interest: Hazlitt's essay, Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon, in The Spirit of the Age; two most complimentary reviews by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 34, Aug. 1820, and vol. 37, Nov. 1822; a briefer discussionprobably by Lockhart-in Blackwood's, vol. 6, Feb. 1820; and Thackeray's notice of Irving's death entitled Nil Nisi Bonum, first printed in the Cornhill Magazine, vol. 1, 1860, and now included in Roundabout Papers. NOTES A HISTORY OF NEW YORK 250. Wouter Van Twiller, the subject of this chapter, was the fifth of the Dutch Governors of New York, and held office from 1633-1637. THE AUTHOR'S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF 253. From The Sketch-Book. This somewhat autobiographical description at once suggests Addison's description of the Spectator. RIP VAN WINKLE 255. From The Sketch-Book. The source of the story, as the author's note suggests, was the German tradition concerning the Emperor Frederick the Red-Beard. Students interested in the development of the short story will find an interesting contrast in mood and method between the leisurely manner of Irving, as illustrated here and in The Moor's Legacy (above, p. 270), and the tense emotionalism of Poe. THE MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE 264. From The Sketch-Book. The subject of this essay-the changes in literary styles-came to affect Irving in an unpleasant way. In 1846 his publishers informed him that there was no need for a new edition of his works because |