nklin. _Autobiography_. Edited by John Bigelow.
Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.]

6. _Essays and Bagatelles_. Vol. ii of Franklin's Works. Edited by
Jared Sparks. Boston: 1836.

7. Moses Coit Tyler. _A History of American Literature_. 1607-1765.
New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds,
Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money
Plenty in Every Man's Pocket_, etc.

[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek
characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.]

CHAPTER II.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

1765-1815.

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between
the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine
colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second
war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period.
This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.
Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the
years of construction. But the men who led the movement for
independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping
the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of
the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as
distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at
least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow
its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a
better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until
the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the
Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these
were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the
consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the
contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and
Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than
literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due
course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of
Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under
consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges,
and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that
preceded and accompanied