He was the first of our writers to show a balanced sense of
humor and to use it as an agent in impressing truth on unwilling listeners.
He is an equally great apostle of the practical and the altruistic,
although he lacked the higher spirituality of the old Puritans and of the
Quaker, John Woolman. This age is marked by a comparative decline in the
influence of the clergy. Not a single clerical name appears on the list of
the most prominent writers.
This period shows the beginning of American fiction, dominated by English
writers, like Samuel Richardson. The early novels, like Mrs. Morton's _The
Power of Sympathy_, were usually prosy, didactic, and as dull as the Sunday
school books of three quarters of a century ago. The victory of the English
school of romanticists influenced Charles Brockden Brown, the first
professional American author, to throw off the yoke of classical
didacticism and regularity and to write a group of Gothic romances, in
which the imagination was given a freer rein than the intellect. While he
freely employed the imported Gothic elements of "strangeness added to
terror," he nevertheless managed to give a distinctively American coloring
to his work by showing the romantic use to which the Indian and the forest
could be put.
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