II


One of the historians of American literature has written that these
Letters furnish "a greater number of delightful pages than any other
book written in America during the eighteenth century, save only
Franklin's Autobiography." A safe compliment, this; and yet does not
the very emptiness of American annals during the eighteenth century
make for our cherishing all that they offer of the vivid and the
significant? Professor Moses Coit Tyler long ago suggested what was
the literary influence of the American Farmer, whose "idealised
treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects
upon the imaginations of Campbell, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and
furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes
of literary colonisation in America as that of 'Pantisocracy.'"
Hazlitt praised the book to his friends and, as we have seen,
commended it to readers of the Edinburgh Review. Lamb mentions it in
one of his letters--which is already some distinction. Yet when was
a book more completely lost to popular view--even among the books
that have deserved oblivion? The Letters were published, all the
same, at Belfast and Dublin and Philadelphia, as well as at London;
they were recast in French by the author, translated into German and
Dutch by pirating penny-a-liners, and given a "sequel" by a
publisher at Paris. [Footnote: Ouvrage pour servir de suite aux
Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain, Paris, 1785. The work so offered
seems to have been a translation of John Filson's History of
Kentucky (Wilmington, Del., 1784).]