Trumbull's _McFingal_--if we read them at all--as history, and to learn
about the times or the men. But we read the _Sketch Book_, and
_Knickerbocker's History of New York_, and the _Conquest of Granada_
for themselves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of
literary art.

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan
standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a
minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come
to light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these
forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned
to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and
of Griswold's _Poets of America_ and _Prose Writers of America_. We
may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the
thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and
Channing.

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other
government in this country than the government of the United States,
and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition. Born in the
very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the
sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which
he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war,
of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He was well fitted
for the task of mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn to the
venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes,
with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which,
even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region
about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes
in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow