characteristic of American
oratory and soon to be satirized in "Martin Chuzzlewit"? Or was it
prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast
changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external
changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of
seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the
development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in
wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of
the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy.
But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature.
The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It
was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men
who in 1815 founded "The North American Review." British critics in "The
Edinburgh" and "The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel
in America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil.
Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared
in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence
they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for
literature.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American
book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or
statue?"

Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived
all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was
eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's
Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in
his rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London
and Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last
of the Mohicans." Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a
new phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience
in labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of
these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger
company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of
the number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826
Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn
to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were
settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as
a minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that Uni