THE FIRST ATTEMPTS.--MRS. SARAH MORTON published in Boston in 1789 a novel
entitled _The Power of Sympathy_. This is probably the first American novel
to appear in print. The reason for such a late appearance of native fiction
may be ascribed to the religious character of the early colonists and to
the ascendency of the clergy, who would not have tolerated novel reading by
members of their flocks. Jonathan Edwards complained that some of his
congregation were reading forbidden books, and he gave from the pulpit the
names of the guilty parties. These books were probably English novels. Sir
Leslie Stephen thinks that Richardson's _Pamela_ (1740) may have been one
of the books under the ban. There is little doubt that a Puritan church
member would have been disciplined if he had been known to be a reader of
some of Fielding's works, like _Joseph Andrews_ (1742). The Puritan clergy,
even at a later period, would not sanction the reading of novels unless
they were of the dry, vapid type, like the earliest Sunday school books.
Jonathan Edwards wrote the story of one of his youthful experiences, but it
was "the story of a spiritual experience so little involved with the earth,
that one might fancy it the story of a soul that had missed being born."

Timothy Dwight (p. 92), who became president of Yale in 1795, said that
there is a great gulf fixed between novels and the _Bible_. Even later than
1800 there was a widespread feeling that the reading of novels imperiled
the salvation of the soul. To-day we know that certain novels are as
dangerous to the soul as leprosy to the body, but we have become more
discriminating. We have learned that the right type of fiction, read in
moderation, cultivates the imagination, broadens the sympathetic powers,
and opens up a new, interesting, and easily accessible land of enjoyment.

A quarter of a century before the _Declaration of Independence_, the great
eighteenth-century English writers of fiction had given a new creation to
the literature of England. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) had published