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[45] us from America, “said Lord Chatham,” when you consider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation — and it has been my favorite study — I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world — for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion,--under such a compilation of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal.


Fisher Ames.

This fine intellectual exhibition, if it belonged rather to statesmanship than to literature, should have prepared the way for literature. The more cultivated English people were not unprepared for seeing it in the American colonies; for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant man of his time, had written to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would “one day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xenophon at New York.” Unfortunately a different influence came in the way. In New England, whence much of this intellectual work had proceeded, the prevailing party among

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