peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute
against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era
commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free
representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by
improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and
an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of
knowledge through the community such as has been before
altogether unknown and unheard of."

Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of
American oratory and soon to be satirized in "Martin Chuzzlewit"?
Or was it prompted by a deep and true instinct for the
significance of the vast changes that had come over American life
since 1776? The external changes were familiar enough to
Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable
territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of
roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and
population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of the
new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national
energy. But this energy was inadequately expressed by the
national literature. The more cultivated Americans were quite
aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessimistic
Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded "The
North American Review." British critics in "The Edinburgh" and
"The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel in
America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil.
Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics,
declared in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their
independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences,
for the arts, for literature . . . . In the four quarters of the