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[43] before its literature was born. If it has been often asserted that there was no book published in America, before 1800, which retains a place in literature, it has also been more than once asserted that since 1800, with the exception of Daniel Webster and Wendell Phillips, America has not produced an orator. Both opinions are one-sided; but what is true is that in America, as in Rome, oratory reached its climax first; literature came later.

Europeans did not, of course, hear the early congressional speeches, which, however, often went across the ocean in the shape of pamphlets. In many cases, those early orators retain their English reputation to this day, but not in all. My friend, Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, grandson of the poet, who is now engaged at the British Museum on an annotated edition of Byron, once crossed the great reading-room to ask me if I had ever heard of any such American name as P. Henry, and showed me such a reference in a note to one of Byron's poems. He expressed pleasure when I told him that there certainly was a man named Patrick Henry, with whom I was not personally acquainted,

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