Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[206] South, and of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. At “Prince-town” he finds “a handsome school and college for the education of dissenters, erected upon the plan of those in Scotland,” with “about twenty boys in the grammar-school, and sixty in the college.” There are “only two professors, besides the provost.” He sees beautiful homes along the Raritan River, and handsome ladies at “Brunswick” ; but the people of Rhode Island “are cunning, deceitful, and selfish” though he adds: “After having said so much to the disadvantage of this colony, I should be guilty of injustice and ingratitude, were I not to declare that there are many worthy gentlemen in it, who see the misfortunes of their country, and lament them.” The lower classes at Boston are insufferably inquisitive; yet “Arts and Sciences seem to have made a greater progress here than in any other part of America.” By 1798 Burnaby might well have revised his prediction that “America is formed for happiness, but not for empire.” Before this there had been critics more hostile, like J. F. D. Smyth; but in British travellers who really belong to the period about 1800, there is a new and characteristic note of displeasure. Weld remarks that the Pennsylvania farmers “live in a penurious style” ; they are “greatly inferior to the English.” The roads are “execrable,” and the Americans in general are prying. In Ashe, who had expected too much, the reaction against both people and customs is violent; he grieves because at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he “did not meet with a man of decent literature” ; and this is the mildest of his abuse. Weld, Parkinson, Ashe, and Bradbury, in a line, raise and re-echo the note of censure. Before Bradbury's work was published, there was a dismal chorus from the great British periodicals. As early as 1814 The Quarterly review was chiming in, to be duly followed by the Edinburgh and the British, and by Blackwood's magazine. Both Gifford and Sydney Smith lent their voices, and Southey was supposed by the Americans to have produced one of the bitterest attacks upon them. Various causes exasperated the discussion-discontented emigrants, discontent in England at the emigration, vainglory in America, especially over the outcome of the second war, the sensitiveness of Americans to the charge of inquisitiveness and lack of reserve, and, by no means least, the pirating of English books by American publishers.