would be rulers in their own house; they would determine their own religious rites and ceremonies, for such things were, as the Prayer Book hath it, in their own. nature indifferent.' They determined them, therefore, after a fashion suited to national needs; but in prescribing them they 'condemned no other nation'; for they thought it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God's honour and glory.' In words like these we hear the voice of the national spirit, which claims its own freedom and recognises a similar right of freedom in other lands. Here speaks the true Christian spirit, which acknowledges diversities of administration as well as diversities of gift, and sees in them manifestations of that one and the selfsame spirit which divides to every man and every nation severally as he will.

It was thus that the idea of national churches was recognised in England. It is an idea which, I understand, is abhorrent to a certain type of sectarians to-day. Men of this type dream of Catholicism as the path towards union; for union, in their minds, spells uniformity, and uniformity means surrender to Latinism. Not thus will the reunion of Christendom come; it can only come in the frank recognition of divergence, in the same acceptance of varieties, by which the vitality as well as the virility of worship can be preserved. The want in France to-day is the want of a Church which embodies Christian faith in a form natural to the French genius. The Gallican liberties were parted with at a price which robbed the Church of its national character. The restoration of such liberties by the wisdom and intelligence of the French people to-day would be a measure that would bring the spirit of religion and the spirit of patriotism into a noble alliance, and would prove a step along the true road to the reunion of Christendom. The way to world-federation is by the road of free nationality; and the way to Christian union in the world is by the recognition of national varieties in ecclesiastical life.

W. BOYD CARPENTER.

Art. 4.-BRITISH WRITERS ON THE UNITED STATES.

1. Travels in the United States, 1798-1802. Davis, 1803.

2. Odes and Epistles. By Thomas Moore, 1806.

By John

3. The Sketchbook. By Washington Irving, 1819-20.

4. Domestic Manners of the Americans. By Mrs Trollope, 1832.

5. The American Revolution in our School Text-books. By Charles Altschul. New York: Doran Co., 1917. 6. The American Oxonian. Vols I-IV, 1914–17. And other works.

IN The Sketchbook,' Washington Irving lamented a literary animosity daily growing up between England and America.' Writers in this country, he said, were 'instilling anger and resentment into the bosom of a youthful nation, to grow with its growth and to strengthen with its strength.' In a postscript to 'Bracebridge Hall' he returned to the theme. He quoted from the Quarterly Review' a 'generous text,' which he lamented that publication should so often forget':

'There is a sacred bond between us by blood and by language which no circumstances can break. Our literature must always be theirs; and, though their laws are no longer the same as ours, we have the same Bible, and we address one common Father in the same prayer. Nations are too ready to admit that they have natural enemies; why should they be less willing to believe that they have natural friends?'

Irving insisted that the people of the United States were not only the natural but also the conscious and willing friends of the people of Great Britain, but they had 'been rendered morbidly sensitive by the attacks made upon their country by the English press; and their occasional irritability on this subject has been misinterpreted into a settled and unnatural hostility.' The friendship of which Irving spoke was not much more than courtesy, for he was not 'so sanguine as to believe that the two nations are ever to be bound together by any romantic ties of feeling.'

Irving knew this country well. He had been recognised as the first great man of letters that the Republic had produced, and he had many British friends, among them Sir Walter Scott, to whom he had paid (for our pleasure and profit as well as his own) a well-recorded visit at Abbotsford. Of all Americans then living he was probably the most hopeful about the future relations of his country and ours. Other observers were less confident; and, in the year before the 'Sketchbook' was published, John Bristed, an Englishman who had become domiciled in the United States, assured us that Delenda est Carthago' was the motto of America with regard to Great Britain, and that the ocean would 'ere long have its waters deeply dyed with American and British blood.' Bristed's belief was the result, not of acute observation of conditions in America, but of an emotional zeal for his adopted country; and events have proved Irving to be the safer prophet. He himself contributed not a little to the realisation of better things than he dared to prophesy.

Irving's indignation at the treatment of his own country and people by some of the English writers of the early years of the 19th century was not without cause. Yet during the American war itself the tone of men of letters had been friendly to the Americans; and Wraxall scarcely exaggerated when he said, in his Memoirs, that, with the exception of Johnson and Gibbon, 'all the eminent or shining talents of the country were marshalled in support of the Colonies.' Johnson's defence of his position was so weak that Boswell dared to get the better of him in argument. He was rewarded, a little later in the conversation, by an unusually offensive remark, for which the great man apologised by admitting that it was a revenge for the American discussion, and that he had deferred it because, Sir, I had nothing ready. A man cannot strike till he has his weapons.' On another occasion, Johnson's ill-tempered vehemence against the Americans subjected him to a rebuke from Miss Seward, who certainly regarded herself as representing (and did, in this instance, represent) the literary opinion of the time: Sir, this is an instance that we are always most violent against those whom we have injured.' Gibbon's silent votes in the House of Commons for what

he described as 'the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest of the mother-country' were determined by his personal relations with Lord North and the Government, all of whose measures he did not approve. There is a third exception, John Wesley, who, like Johnson, wrote a pamphlet in defence of the Government; but Wesley's first impulses-he was apparently converted by Johnson -were on the side of the colonists.

'In spite of all my rooted prejudice,' he told Lord Dartmouth in 1775, 'I cannot avoid thinking (if I think at all) that an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their legal rights, and that in the most modest and inoffensive manner which the nature of the thing would allow' (Hist. MSS. Comm. xi, App. 5, p. 378).

Hume gave point to Johnson's gibe that 'he was a Tory by chance' by agreeing with Burke and Chatham, and he foretold the success of the Americans (Hill Burton's Hume,' ii, p. 482). Soldiers, like Lord Balcarres, who took part in the war, acknowledged 'the great fundamental points of military institution sobriety, subordination, regularity, and courage,' which had produced the American victory. Nor, though the evidence is scarcely relevant to purely literary opinion, should it be forgotten that, when the war was over and the American cause had triumphed, the King in his first interview with the Envoy of the Republic, acknowledging the agitation of his feelings, had, in brave and manly words, assured the Ambassador that, as he had been the last man in Great Britain to admit the independence of his American Dominions, he would likewise be the last to infringe it.

There never has been any change in the attitude of our great writers towards the American people; and the books of which Irving complained were the work of men who, with one exception, had little claim to distinction. 'It has been the peculiar lot of our country,' he wrote, 'to be visited by the worst kind of English travellers.' A brief survey of some of their productions will show that the words were not unjustified. The worst of all these ignoble books was 'Travels in the United States, 1798-1802,' by John Davis (published in 1803). It was

dedicated by permission to President Jefferson and contained a letter from him to the author, and it thus attracted much more attention than it deserved.

Davis had wandered through parts of the United States, making a precarious living as a tutor; his book was full of painful efforts at wit and of exercises in the sentimentalism which was characteristic of the period, and it was grossly offensive to the Americans. It was followed in 1805 by Richard Parkinson's 'Tour in America in 1798-1800,' which, though a more respectable production than its predecessor, was also the work of an unsuccessful adventurer, who missed the comforts of the old country, resented his failure to make his way in the new, and avenged himself by scurrilous attacks upon a people who had not appreciated him. Another unlucky speculator, Charles William Janson, who had been, among other things, a briefless barrister in Rhode Island, likewise vented his wrath upon the manners and morals of the people of the United States (The Stranger in America,' 1807). H. B. Fearon's 'Narrative' (1818) professed a profound admiration for George Washington; but the writer found that there was little scope for himself and his friends in the States, and he took the opportunity of indulging in many disagreeable and frequently silly reflections upon the American people. An equally bitter tone pervades Thomas Ashe's 'Travels in America (1809). These men are all unknown to fame, and the Americans may have resented more deeply the 'Odes and Epistles' (1806) of Tom Moore, who had made a journey through the States. How far I was right in assuming the tone of a satirist against a people whom I viewed but as a stranger and a visitor, is a doubt which my feelings did not allow me to investigate,' he says in his Preface. He had nothing but scorn for the 'bastard Freedom' of the United States, and he foretold their 'slow and cold stagnation into vice':

"'Tis one dull chaos, one unfertile strife

Betwixt half-polish'd and half-barbarous life.'

Irving's protest did not put an end to the foolish and trivial criticisms of American manners which had rendered such books irritating to the Americans. Adlard Welby (Visit to North America,' 1821) found a most