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to interrupt our connection and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free elections re-established them in power. At this very time they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our own blood, but Scotch and other foreign mercenaries, to invade and destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affections, and manly spirit bids to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war, in peace friends.

We might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems, is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it: the road to happiness and to glory is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them, and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation!

We therefore the representatives of the United States in General Congress assembled in the name and by the authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve all political connection which may heretofore have subsisted between us and the people or parliament of Great Britain, and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independant, and that as free and independant states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

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[Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence as preserved in the Department of State. It is here reprinted from P. L. Ford's Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. ii, pp. 42–58, by permission of the publishers, G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

[Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, Jan. 17, 1771, and died in the same city, of consumption, Feb. 22, 1810. By his own statement, made in a letter written just before his death, we learn that he never had more than one continuous half-hour of perfect health. In spite of his short life and his ill-health he accomplished much. At first he studied law, but abandoned it for literature. He was a frequent contributor to the magazines of the time and was himself the editor of the Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799), and the Literary Magazine and American Register (1803-8). His first published work, The Dialogue of Alcuin (1797), dealt with questions of marriage and divorce, and he was also the author of several essays on political, historical, and geographical subjects. His novels followed each other with astonishing rapidity: Sky Walk; or the Man Unknown to Himself (1798, not published), Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), Ormond; or the Secret Witness (1799), Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (17991800), Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1801), Jane Talbot (1801), and Clara Howard; or the Enthusiasm of Love (1801). They met with an equally astonishing success, and constitute the first important contribution to American fiction. The standard text of Brown's works, based on early editions, is that published by David McKay, and from this, with his permission, the extracts are reprinted.]

WHEN, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication of a Library of American Biography, he included in the very first volume — with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in the severer paths of history a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative writer worth mentioning in America, and to one who was our first professional author. He was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence concealed doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate, secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women

was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley in her novel of The Last Man founds her description of an epidemic on "the masterly delineations of the author of Arthur Mervyn."

Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin's philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of women, a subject on which his first book, Alcuin, provided the earliest American protest. Undoubtedly his books furnished a point of transition from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also by a Philadelphian, called Stanley; or the Man of the World, first published in 1839 in London, though the scene was laid in America. This book was attributed, from its profuse literary information, to Edward Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a very young man of twenty-one, Horace Binney Wallace. In this book the influence of Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown's concealed chambers and aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full force, not without some lingering power, and then vanish from American literature forever.

Brown's style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of his characters, is perhaps unduly characterized by Professor Woodberry as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama." What this able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic, and that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made the picture unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech.

Even a comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in composing Brown's biography only sixty years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. Instead of stating simply that his hero was a born Quaker, he says of him: "He was descended from a highly respectable family, whose parents were of that estimable sect who came over with William Penn, to seek an asylum where they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble spirit of their own faith." Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying, “I was fraught with the apprehension that my life was endangered;" or "his brain seemed to swell beyond its continent;" or "I drew every bolt that appended to it," or "on recovering from deliquium, you found it where it had been dropped ; or for resorting to the circumlocution of saying, "by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce a light," when he really meant that he had a tinderbox. The criticism is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us half way back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that " from his earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over some heavy tome." If the tome in question was Johnson's dictionary, as it may have been, it would explain both Brown's phraseology and the milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story signatures of Micawber's letters, as represented by Dickens, go but little beyond the similar courtesies employed in a gentlewoman's letters in the days of Anna Seward. All we can say is that within a century, for some cause or other, English speech has grown very much simpler, and human happiness has increased in proportion.

In the preface to his second novel (Edgar Huntly) Brown announces it as his primary purpose to be American in theme, "to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of our own country," adding "That the field of investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe may be readily conceived." He protests against "puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras," and

adds: "The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness are far more suitable." All this is admirable, but unfortunately the inherited thoughts and methods of the period hung round him to cloy his style, even after his aim was emancipated. It is to be remembered that almost all his imaginative work was done in early life, before the age of thirty and before his powers became mature. Yet with all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, and had laid the foundation for American fiction.

With all his inflation of style, he was undoubtedly, in his way, a careful observer. The proof of this is that he has preserved for us many minor points of life and manners which make the Philadelphia of a century ago now more familiar to us than is any other American city of that period. He gives us the roving Indian; the newly arrived French musician with violin and monkey; the onestory farm-houses, where boarders are entertained at a dollar a week; the gray cougar amid caves of limestone. We learn from him "the dangers and toils of a midnight journey in a stage coach in America. The roads are knee deep in mire, winding through crags and pits, while the wheels groan and totter and the curtain and roof admit the wet at a thousand seams." We learn the proper costume for a youth of good fortune and family, — “nankeen coat striped with green, a white silk waistcoat elegantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons, stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that in their softness vie with satin." When dressing himself, this favored youth ties his flowing locks with a black ribbon. We find from him that "stage boats" then crossed twice a day from New York to Staten Island, and we discover also with some surprise that negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages in Pennsylvania, although they were liable, half a century later, to be ejected from street-cars. We learn also that there were negro free schools in Philadelphia. All this was before

1801.

It has been common to say that Brown had no literary skill, but it would be truer to say that he had no sense of literary construction. So far as skill is tested by the power to pique curiosity, Brown had it; his chapters almost always end at a point of especial interest, and the next chapter, postponing the solution, often

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