Note 1147 — APPENDICES

In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in American Literature, 1607-1885 (New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton, which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.