stocks, the largest non-English elements being German and
Scotch-Irish--that is, Scotch who had settled for a while in
Ulster before emigrating to America. "About one-third of the
colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside
of America." Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" thus
defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch,
Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous
breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The Atlantic
seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by
local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political
organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young
utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a
federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous
breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual
life the English tradition was almost absolute.

The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this
estimate. The "Boston News-Letter," begun in 1704, was the first
of the journals, if we omit the single issue of "Publick
Occurrences" in the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly
fifty colonial newspapers and several magazines. Their influence
made for union, in Franklin's sense of that word, and their
literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, were found
in London. The "New England Courant," established in Boston in
1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the "Tatler,"
"Spectator," and "Guardian." What is more, the "Courant" boasted
of its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton,
the "Spectator," and Swift's "Tale of a Tub."* This was in 1722.
If we remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been
discovered in the colonial literature of the seventeenth century,