[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek
characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.]




CHAPTER II.


THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

1765-1815.

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between
the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine
colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second
war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period.
This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.
Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the
years of construction. But the men who led the movement for
independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping
the Constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of
the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as
distinctly political as that of the colonial era--in New England at
least--was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow
its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a
better term, we call _belles lettres_, was not born in America until
the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the