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1776-1860] The "Hartford Wits:' Brown. Irving. 741 successors, and poems modelled on the verse which had been fashionable in England from Butler's time to that of Pope and Churchill. During the Revolution and the years which followed this little group, commonly remembered as the " Hartford Wits," burst into the first literary efflo- rescence which foretold the coming literature of their country. They were all graduates of Yale College ; all men of character, wit, ability, and accomplishment; and all eagerly enthusiastic. But none of them had much originality; and, although their poems and satires were creditably imitative, they revealed, in the end, nothing more than that Americans could imitate skilfully. Except as matter of literary history, they have long been neglected and forgotten. The writer who is now commonly regarded as the earliest professional man of letters in America flourished a very little later. Wieland, the first novel of Charles Brqckden Brown, was published in 1798. Before his premature death in 1810, Brown had produced several more works of darkly romantic fiction. His general model was Godwin's Caleb Williams. In his effort to preserve a definite point of view by means of autobio- graphic narration, he was apt to make his plots so intricate that they became bewildering. But his writings, even after a century, possess two or three vital merits ; he had a deep sense of the horrors which lie in the mysterious regions beyond human ken a sense naturally involved in the speculative idealism so characteristic of his country ; he was able, at the same time, to write vivid descriptions of actual nature and of certain grim aspects of fact, particularly of the terrors of pestilence; and his style, despite its crude grandiloquence, possessed a remarkably felicitous accuracy of rhythm. Brown, like the "Hartford Wits," has hardly survived except his- torically. Washington Irving, whose first books appeared before Brown's death, is read to-day. His early work was broadly humorous, fore- shadowing the later humour of America, which inextricably intermingles plain statements of fact with extravagant nonsense. Two years later he began to produce another kind of work, and one more deeply charac- teristic, in the essays and the short stories of the Sketch Book and the similar works which followed. They express, with admirable amenity, that delight in romance, whether the romance be of mystery or of an illimitable past, which has been so frequent in the superficially prosaic and new America of the nineteenth century. His later work, which persisted until his death in 1859, was apt to be professedly historical ; but whether he was dealing with Columbus, or with Goldsmith, or with Washington, he wrote history rather in the temper of a romantic man of letters than in that of a scientific scholar. What keeps him alive is not so much what he said as the manner in which he said it. With all the romantic enthusiasm of his own time he combined a formal grace of style hardly equalled in England after his model Goldsmith had laid down his pen.