re,
where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the
schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the
familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of
prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old
Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their
gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic
are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who
could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have
made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total
of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and
this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at
the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the
Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that
would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this
kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in
gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness
than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth
century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes
of taste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan
writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the
_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from
Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the
Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of
Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already
been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we
find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New
Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem
on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and
the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral
Essays_:

"Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms,
Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms;
To shining palaces let fools resort,
And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,
From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
The