Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[60] Americanism unaccompanied by a war-whoop. The Saturday Review, wishing to emphasize its contempt for Henry Ward Beecher, finally declares that one would turn from him with relief even to the poems of Whittier.

There could hardly have been a more exhaustive proof of this local limitation or chauvinisme than I myself noticed at a London dinner-party some years ago. Our host was an Oxford professor, and the company was an eminent one. Being hard pressed about American literature, I had said incidentally that a great deal of intellectual activity in America was occupied, and rightly, by the elucidation of our own history,—a thing, I added, which inspired almost no interest in England. This fact being disputed, I said, ‘Let us take a test case. We have in America an historian superior to Motley in labors, in originality of treatment, and in style. If he had, like Motley, first gone abroad for a subject, and then for a residence, his European fame would have equalled Motley's. As it is, probably not a person present except our host will recognize his name.’ When I mentioned Francis Parkman, the prediction