... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of
England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to
sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally
still only a province of this country.' With a gallantry too
characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his
taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of
discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington
Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he
is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed
our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite
to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an
undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the
Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation
of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of
that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an
intellectual _quid pro quo_, which will doubtless be received gratefully
by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its
co-nationality with Irving.
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