10-04-40 64. PREFACE. A HISTORY of our vernacular literature has occupied my stu dies for many years. It was my design, not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of authors, but, following the steps of the human mind through the wide track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress, and the decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as the objects presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals. In the progress of these researches, many topics presented themselves, some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation. Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy of books, where their subjects, their tendency, and their immediate or gradual influence over the people, discover their actual condition. Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion: the great form an epoch, the many reflect their age. With them the transient becomes permanent, the suppressed lies open; and they are the truest representatives of their nation for those very passions with which they are themselves infected. The pen of the ready writer transmits to us the public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncrasy, we are deeply interested in the secret connection of the incidents of their lives with their intellectual |