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“LONDON REVIEW,” The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review Containing Sketches and Reports of Philosophy, Religion, History, Arts, and Manners, vol. 1, no. 4 (1 May 1804), pp. 323–5.
Anonymous
The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review was a relatively successful miscellany, published in ten volumes from November 1803 through June 1811. The editor for its first six months was David Phineas Adams, a Harvard graduate and Boston school teacher. Starting with the May 1804 issue, in which the piece reprinted below appeared, the editor was the Rev. William Emerson (1769–1811), the father of then-infant Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82). On the Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, pp. 253–5. On Hume’s advice to Edward Gibbon (1737–94), referred to below, see his letter to Gibbon of 24 October 1767: “Let the French … triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inundation of Barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language” (G.Y.T. Greig, ed. The Letters of David Hume, 2 volumes [Oxford, 1932], vol. 2, p. 171). As other selections in this volume also show, Hume’s American reception was influenced by the circulation of his private correspondence, once published.
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LONDON REVIEW.
AS literary men are commonly curious to learn the opinion of foreigners respecting the scientific character of their country, the readers of the Monthly Anthology are here presented with an extract from the London Catalogue of the New London Review for part of the year 1799.
DAVID HUME, to dissuade GIBBON from writing, rather in the French, than in the English language, foretold to him, with exultation, that the empire of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE would one day be prodigiously strengthened and enlarged by means of the British settlements in America and in India.
It has happened as he foretold. From the port of London, from Glasgow, from Liverpool, there is a very large annual exportation of British books to NORTH AMERICA. In Philadelphia, at New-York, and in the other more considerable towns of the American States, a very great diversity of English publications continually issue from the press; newspapers, magazines, reviews, and annual registers, the usual variety of periodical works, are all published, in great abundance, among the Americans. And, though much of the literary matter which they contain, is borrowed from European books; yet a great quantity of very excellent original communications likewise appears in them.
The transactions of the American Philosophical Society are regularly published, after convenient intervals; nor can they fail to interest, in a very high degree, the curiosity of the philosophers of Europe. Morse has successfully laboured to illustrate the history and the geography of America. Smith, a philosopher of the school of Kaimes, Hume, and Robertson, has in some dissertations and sermons, exhibited a spirit of research, a vein of original thinking, and a manly vigour of composition, not unworthy of his masters, even where he contests their opinions and corrects their errours. Joel Barlow who came to Europe, as an apostle of democratical reform, had before distinguished himself, as the author of some excellent poesy, of genuine American growth. Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan, and other poems more recently written, are certainly not inferiour in merit, to much of the contemporary poetry of Britain. Trumbul’s MacFingal has risen to the rank of a classic in America, as a mock-heroic poem; and is even well-known in this country.
Yet, in truth, it appears to us, not so surprising, that these poets have already thus adorned the English literature of America; as that a region where life is still so considerably rural, where the beauties of nature are so wild, so luxuriant; so sublime and picturesque, so endlessly varied, where there is so much to favour their melancholy musing which elevates the soul to poetic ecstasies; should not yet have produced poetical excellence even of a higher class than has appeared in the old world, either in ancient, or in modern times.
Medical literature, too, has been very much cultivated in America, though the physicians of Philadelphia and New York, have, indeed, been hitherto, unable, to extirpate those dreadful, epidemical disorders, by which the ranks of life are, there, from time to time, so terribly thinned; they have, however, recorded a number of very interesting medical facts respecting the oeconomy of human health; and have arranged these under several theories not destitute of ingenuity.
Among those who have the most ardently cultivated the natural history of America in its connexion with medicine, is Dr Benjamin Smith Barton. His Materia Medica from America, is now in a train of publication. Some parts of it which we have seen in London, incline us to expect, that the whole work will prove highly valuable and useful. All the most classical works of English philosophy and literature are reprinted and read in America with the greatest fondness. Distance of place seems, here, to operate with somewhat of the same efficacy as remoteness of time; and contribute to make the Americans regard our best English authors, with a veneration greater than they have been able to command at home, and scarcely less than if they had been the contemporaries and rivals of a Homer or a Tully, or any others of the most illustrious writers of antiquity.