File:American facts - notes and statistics relative to the government, resources, engagements, manufactures, commerce, religion, education, literature, fine arts, manners and customs of the United States (14750524156).jpg

Identifier: americanfactsn00putn (find matches)
Title: American facts : notes and statistics relative to the government, resources, engagements, manufactures, commerce, religion, education, literature, fine arts, manners and customs of the United States of America
Year: 1845 (1840s)
Authors: Putnam, George Palmer, 1814-1872
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Wiley and Putnam
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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re necessarily more engaged in level-ing forests and panthers, than in serving the Musesin academic shades: and the few polemical treatises,historical tracts, and rhyming couplets, which the natives allowed them leisure to manufacture, weremostly of too local or temporary an interest to be per-petuated, and they are now almost forgotten or seldomreferred to. There were among the pilgrims, andtheir children, a Winthrop, a Mather, a Bradford, aPrince, and a Hutchinson, to commemorate the ad-venturous progress of those hardy and high-mindedmen who became the founders of a nation; a RogerWilliams, a Cotton, and many others, to beat thedrum ecclesiastic, and chronicle the dogmatical andpugnacious theology so peculiar to that age; and aBroadstreet, a Wolcott, a Trumbull, to invade therealms of imagination, and perpetrate dull rhymes onprosy subjects: but all these are only preserved ascuriosities on the shelves of historical societies, oroccasionally quoted for the same purpose by a chro- i
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Pabiredby J VV Jdr»ii E,i.4>idvr.il,y e >riv. JTVMKS IliMJMOJfh: rOOFER r^ ■ fC^-f c^v* or-^^ Coc^/iy-K^ NOTICES OF AUTHORS. 89 nological collector of national jingles. With theexception of the political writings of Adams, Jefferson,Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, already mentioned, theworks of Franklin and the State Papers of Washington,the durable part of American literature, if there beany such, belongs to the last 30 years. The veteran Noah Webster, who died two yearssince, at the age of eighty-five, was the first to proposea law for the recognition and protection of literaryproperty in the United States. This was soon afterthe national independence was accomplished. Web-ster was the author of several useful works on edu-cation, besides historical and political papers, whichwere recently collected. His elementary spelling-book is used in every part of the country, and hasbeen the chief cause of that uniformity of pronuncia-tion in widely distant places, which has been oftenre

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