They seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army."
It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as
has often been said, was more like a continuation of English
society, while New England represented a digression from English
society. There were then, as now, "stand-patters" and
"progressives." It was the second class who, while retaining very
conservative notions about property, developed a fearless
intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the history
of the United States. But to the student of early American
literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is
dealing with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead"
as such. He has learned from recent historians to distrust any
such facile classification of the first colonists. He knows by
this time that there were aristocrats in Massachusetts and
commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more
tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island was
more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general
statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always
go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual
person.
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