Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these
were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the
consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the
contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and
Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than
literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due
course in the present chapter. It is also true that one or two of
Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under
consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges,
and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that
preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches
of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy,
in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of
a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and
in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and
congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished
naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a
rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the
declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox,
Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early
Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is
largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page
loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is
good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is
sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional,
rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are
really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we