e
of Wierus.

New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady
maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was,
naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.
These men--Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and so many
others--had all received the same sort of education as Europeans of
letters used to receive. They had not started as printers' devils, or
newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic. It
does not matter much how a genius begins--as a rural butcher, or an
apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer to the Signet. Still, the New
Englanders were academic and classical. New England has, by this time,
established a tradition of its literary origin and character. Her
children are sons of the Puritans, with their independence, their
narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, their hardiness in doing
without it, their singular scruples of conscience, their sense of the
awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition. We can read of
the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather,
his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating,
doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his
mistake about the Salem witches. These men, or many of them, were deeply-
learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting
from, say, the Restoration to 1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is
erudite, literary--nay, full of literary vanity--mystical, visionary,
credulous to an amusing degree.

But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and
counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War
of Independence. Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance
is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works. Their democracy is
not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.
Their stern Calvinism slackened into many "isms," but left a kind of
religiosity behind it. One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums up his whole
creed in the two words _Pater Noster_. All these hereditary influences
are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in
Hawthorne's. In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror
of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about
conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
literary effects.

A