825D63 OAb PREFA CЕ. Lib. Et + 1 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 passions with which they are themselves infected. those very The pen 940445 [8] |