over two hundred years of age should be
burnt down, was repeating Webster's contempt of the musty halls of
collegiate Cambridge; and Hawthorne, Yankeeizing the Greek myths, and
finding all Rome but the background for his Puritan maiden, was
asserting that new discovery of Europe by America which has ever since
been going on, and was illustrated by Webster's excursions in language
to bring back English variations from American usage.

The ease with which Webster walked about the Jericho of English
lexicography, blowing his trumpet of destruction, was an American ease,
born of a sense that America was a continent and not a province. He
transferred the capital of literature from London to Boston, or New
York, or Hartford,--he was indifferent so long as it was in the United
States. He thought Washington as good an authority on spelling as Dr.
Johnson, and much better than King George. He took the Bible as a book
to be used, not as a piece of antiquity to be sheltered in a museum, and
with an American practicality set about making it more serviceable in
his own way. He foresaw the vast crowds of American children; he knew
that the integrity of the country was conditioned on the intelligibility
of their votes, and he turned his back on England less with indifference
to her than with an absorption in his own country. He made a Speller
which has sown votes and muskets; he made alone a Dictionary, which has
grown, under the impulse he gave it, into a national encyclopaedia,
possessing an irresistible momentum. Indeed, is not the very existence
of that book in its current form a witness to the same Americanism which
Webster displayed, only now in a firmer, finer, and more complex form?

In the high walks of scholarship, where nationality would seem to be
effaced, we have had very recently a capital illustration of the
inevitable tendency of national traits to seek expression. The Appendix
to the "Revised Version of the New Testament" contains the variations
proposed by the American company from the text as otherwise determined.
There were in the English company men of radical temperament and of
conservative; there were in the American company like distinctions;
nevertheless the final separation between the two companies is largely
on this line, and one can easily see how much sympathy, Webster, for
example, would have expressed with the position which the American
company took, a position not of dissent but of independent asserti