tion could still be put on a five-foot shelf. This notion is becoming a little archaic. In the course, of the last hundred years our literature has outgrown its youth and poverty. It is abundant, and it is becoming mature to the verge of sophistication. It has acquired a history, it has developed critical tendencies, it has participated in successive movements, it has produced schools and has evolved styles, it has discovered wide ranges of new material, it has made significant innovations in form, it has even put forth dialectal branches from a sturdily rooted vernacular stock. It has been subject to many influences, but it has also been widely influential. It exhibits all the resources and powers of a national literature. At no very distant period in the future its bulk and diversity will be so immense that Americans will either be obliged to give it the central place in their programme of reading or they will be obliged to remain ignorant of their own national culture and its chief instrument. At the present time it is a conservative estimate to say that nine-tenths of our university teachers are more competent to discuss the literature of England than the literature of America; and the actual quantity—not to speak of the quality—of instruction provided in the higher study of our own literature is relatively insignificant.
This is obviously not a happy state of affairs for native letters; yet this condition is the natural consequence of careless acquiescence in the contention that American must always be a part of English
