"In these sad circumstances the kindest thing we could do for our
suffering friends was to give them a place in the Litany. Our chaplain
for his part did his office and rubbed us up with a seasonable sermon.
This was quite a new thing to our brethren of North Carolina, who live in
a climate where no clergyman can breathe, any more than spiders in
Ireland."
These two selections show that American literature, even before the
Revolution, came to be something more than an imitation of English
literature. They are the product of our soil, and no critic could say that
they might as well have been written in London as in Virginia. They also
show how much eighteenth-century prose had improved in form. Even in
England, modern prose may almost be said to begin with John Dryden, who
died at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In addition to improvement
in form, we may note the appearance of a new quality--humor. Our earliest
writers have few traces of humor because colonization was a serious life
and death affair to them.
DIFFERENT LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF VIRGINIA AND NEW ENGLAND.--As we now go
back more than a hundred years to the founding of the Plymouth colony in
1620, we may note that Virginia and New England developed along different
lines.
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