It was confessed by the pessimistic
Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded "The
North American Review." British critics in "The Edinburgh" and
"The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel in
America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil.
Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics,
declared in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their
independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences,
for the arts, for literature . . . . In the four quarters of the
globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?
or looks at an American picture or statue?"
Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has
outlived all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking
it, London was eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821
came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826,
when Webster was announcing in his rolling orotund that Adams and
Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris booksellers were
covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans.
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